The latest Berry Go Round blog carnival is up at Greg Laden’s Blog. Lots of cool stuff, check it out. Oh, and it looks like we’re next…
8th International Wheat Conference and BGRI 2010 Technical Workshop
Wheat boffins are meeting in St Petersburg. CIMMYT is blogging about it. ICARDA is blogging about it. A whole bunch of people are twittering. So there’s no excuse for not knowing what’s going on.
Green tomato goes red, gets thumbs up
Rebsie Fairholm at Daughter of the Soil has written up the tomatoes she grew last year. One of them I called Pugliese Green, because the seeds came from a variety I buy at the Pugliese shop around the corner. It is green, sharp and tasty. Rebsie’s went red, but at least she agreed with the taste: she says they will “probably become a flavour benchmark”. I wonder whether mine would go red too if they were left longer on the vine. I’ll have a chance to find out soon enough as my seedlings are coming along fine. Meanwhile, Rebsie, try tasting them a bit green.
Why good food is good for you
I don’t know about you, but I do sometimes wonder why (or do I mean how?) good foods are good for you. I know that they contain more things like anti-oxidants and vitamin precursors and vitamins and minerals, but I don’t have a very clear idea of how those things work their magic, if indeed they do. And then I was watching a Tedtalk by a chap called William Li, a doctor with a special interest in cancer.
He was talking about blood vessels and the extremely delicate balance that regulates the life and death of blood vessels in the body, and I realized that I could remember almost nothing about angiogenesis and the hormones that control it. Once I did. Then Li slipped into cancers, and showed that tumours depend for their survival on their blood supply. Cut it off, and tumours shrink. In fact, he said, we probably have loads of mini tumours popping up all the time, less than the size of the tip of a ball-point pen, but in the absence of a blood supply, they just wither and die. Fascinating, so there are fancy drugs that block the growth of blood vessels — antiangiogenesis drugs — and that offer a new approach to treating cancer. And those same drugs can treat obesity in mice genetically predisposed to eat until they become, in Li’s words, “furry tennis balls”.
And then he moved smoothly into diet. And lo, there were lots of foods, many of them them fruits and vegetables, that seemed to have potent anti-angiogenic activity in lab tests. Some of them, combined, are more potent than either on its own or both together. He listed a bunch of foods, and then something that made me perk up even more.
“For each food type, we believe there is different potencies within different strains and varietals. And we want to measure this because, well, while you’re eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that’s most potent for preventing cancer?”
Wow. A man who starts from the assumption that not all varieties are equal. While I am not too happy with the continuing medicalization of nutrition and diet, treating good food as no more than a series of active ingredients, I am glad that at least someone in the medical establishment is taking agricultural biodiversity seriously. Li’s bottom line:
Everyone could benefit from a diet based on local, sustainable, antiangiogenic crops.
Featured: Genetic erosion
André has a bone to pick with the non-circumspect quoting of numbers too:
If the celebration of the Year of Biodiversity is a celebration and mourning of past century(ies), of course idyllic, agriculture and an occasion to bicker against modern agriculture – with little consideration for the challenges ahead, particularly in terms of conservation of agro-biodiversity – then it will have been a formidable failure. I am afraid, we already know the answer.