How can we ever expect to be healthy when we’re shunning the foods our bodies are built for?
Modern Forager gets on a soapbox.
Cereal varieties screened for nutritional benefit
You may remember the obsession we developed here last summer about diversity among crop varieties in nutritional composition in general and glycemic index in particular:
Good measurements of characteristics such as GI for specific, named and recognizable varieties, whether the products of modern breeding or traditional farmer varieties, would be really valuable for lots of reasons, not least to add substance to claims that diversity of diet in and of itself is good for one.
Well, our prayers are being answered. Foodnavigator has a news item about the “Healthgrain diversity screen.” Researchers
grew, harvested and milled 150 wheat varieties used for bread making and 50 other grain varieties — oats, barley and rye — over a one-year period in Hungary. The grains originated worldwide…
They then measured “the components known to play a role in prevention of cardiovascular disease and type-2 diabetes,” including tocols, sterols, phenolic acids, folates, alkylresorcinols and fiber components.
Only one site and one year, and 150 are not that many compared to the tens of thousands of wheat landraces and varieties in the world’s genebanks, but you have to start somewhere, and “the Healthgrain diversity screen has generated the most extensive database currently available on bioactive components in wheat and other smallgrain cereals.” Should be a great breeding resource.
Nibbles: Food, Potatoes, Medicine, Bees, Beer, Food miles, Fungi, Fruits cubed
- “Food is the most cost-effective intervention.”
- Peru promotes potatoes.
- The Importance of Biodiversity to Medicine. Anyone got access? Any mention of nutrition?
- EU Says bees should rest. Problem solved.
- Extreme beer. All problems solved.
- Eat local? I don’t think so.
- Itchy Italian gourmands gutted over climate change-caused truffle troubles.
- Mulberry trees pay the price for immodesty.
- While fig trees planted by Jesuits survive. It’s a funny old world. Fruit tree trifecta in play.
- And it comes in! Today’s saving-the-frigging-English-apple story comes to you from The Guardian. Enough already, the English apple is going to be fine.
Nibbles: Sorghum, Baobab, Coffee squared
- Mosutlhwane? Rice from sorghum. Botswana goes for self-sufficiency.
- Sustainable baobab.
- Growing caffeine-free coffee.
- And, coincidentally, a blog post on wild coffees from Madagascar.
Nibbles: Coffea, Tequila, Livestock wild relatives, Rice wine, Vit. D, Statistics
- Wild coffee studied; report from Madagascar.
- Adding value to tequila. Lots of value.
- Vietnamese farmers go wild.
- Vietnamese farmers get drunk.
- All about Vitamin D.
- “…cranberries are the neglected stepchild of the season.”
- What does that make the turkey?
- Gates Foundation moves into space. Via.