Category: Tidbits
Happy New Years from 21st Century Food
| January 2, 2012 | Posted by Alex under Tidbits |
Welcome back everyone, and let me wish you a Happy New Year’s from the entire team at 21st Century Food!
I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday season!
How to feed 6 men simulating a Mission to Mars for 520 days
| November 8, 2011 | Posted by Alex under Tidbits |
Six members of a Russian space team spend 520 days in isolation to simulate a test flight to Mars. Feeding them proved to be an interesting experiment.
New Blog is up and running
| June 7, 2011 | Posted by Alex under Meal Delivery, Tidbits |
Welcome to our new blog, dear readers!
So, why have we decided to switch our blog’s location? Well, for starters it is now on the same web address as our site. Our old blog used to be hosted by Google over on blogspot, and because of that we didn’t really have full control over it. Now we do, as well as a ton of new functionality.
For starters: our blog is easier to follow. Before, you had to have a Google account to keep track of what was going on. Now, thanks to that handy bar you see on the right side of the screen, you can follow us with any email account or service that you use. As well, making comments is now simpler too, since you only need a valid email address to do so.
Next up, all of our old content is still here, we managed to import everything. If you want to read an old post, it is still out there on our blogger site, but you can also access it over here.
Also, with our current new design, we hope that things look at feel lighter. These posts are here, after all, to offer you some light and informative reading.
We hope you enjoy the changes! Any feedback? Let us know!
A drug to erase bad memories?
| June 2, 2011 | Posted by Alex under Tidbits |
Here’s some odd health news: researchers believe they have developed a pill that can erase bad memories.
When we are experiencing high levels of stress our anxiety, our bodies produce a hormone called cortisol. Researchers at a clinical study realized that the hormone remains with us when we recall the memory and once again feel stressed out, and hypothesized that the hormone itself was tied to reproducing the memory.
By giving volunteers a cortisol-dampening pill after having exposed them to a stressful short film, researchers discovered that patients had difficulty in remembering the film and what it was about it that caused them anxiety in the first place.
This research honestly feels like something out a science-fiction, and eerily close to what happened in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where the main characters both had their memories of each other erased after their relationship grew painful.
While this new pill sounds like it good have positive benefits, such as soothing people haunted by a traumatic event, it also has the potential to be abused. People might see the pill as the solution to minor problems and heart aches, rather than coping with them. Imagine taking a pill to erase your memory every time you make a mistake; you will only end up repeating that mistake over and over.
Our memories and experience make up who we are, without them we would be much like goldfish circling forever in our fish bowl, not realizing how we got there or where we are going. Bad memories are as important as the good, because without them we would never learn from past mistakes or become stronger human beings.
What do you think? Can having some of your memories erased be a good thing, or should we go on living?
Original post at 21st Century Food Blogspot
Watch out arteries: The KFC Double Down is coming back to Canada
| May 25, 2011 | Posted by Alex under Meal Delivery, Tidbits |
Remember that fried monstrosity that FKC released a little while ago called the “Double Down“? People’s arteries the world over cringed the first time that “sandwich” was released, and now it’s bad with a “healthy” (notice the quotation marks!) spin to it.
First, the facts on these terrors:
- Made from two sides of deep fried chicken holding together strips of fried bacon, cheese and special sauce, the whole sandwich sits hardly larger than your hand.
- Contains 32 grams of fat (probably not the good kind either… I’m guessing trans and saturated here)
- 1500 mg of sodium, or around a full day’s worth.
- It’s total calorie count sits around 540. That’s roughly equivalent to a giant bowl of pasta with sauce, except in this case the pasta and sauce would actually fill you up and has nutrients in it.
- Nutritional value: none.
Needless to say, anyone who cares in the least bit about their body should avoid these. In fact, even the people who eat poorly on a regular basis will want to steer clear for their own good.
When it was first released, FKC owners flaunted the fact that it was the single most unhealthy food out there on the market at the time. People eagerly crowded restaurant lines to find out what losing six years of your life tastes like.
Now, the new “healthy” spin on these things is that the makers decided to cut down the sodium by 10%.
That’s it… really.
So instead of 1500 mg of sodium they now contain 1320 mg of sodium, which is still way more than should be in any thing other than a salt lick. Nevermind the amount of fat, calories and the damage that these thigns will do to your blood sugar levels.
It is honestly frightening to think that anyone in the right mind would willingly eat these.
So what does healthy food look like? Well for one, it’s a lot more colourful.
I’ll even say it: it’s a lot more flavourful too. Don’t believe me? Check out our lifestyle menu. Flavour, colour and healthy? Now there’s a real combo.
Original rant over at 21st Century Food Blogspot
Coffee preventing breast cancer? More to it than that.
| May 12, 2011 | Posted by Alex under Lifestyle, Tidbits |
Coffee seems to be a recurring theme in this blog, what with my half-hearted struggle to cut back, and the general fascination that medical researchers seem to have with it. Almost every week, I read something in the news about coffee either being the next best thing for your body, or something to fearfully avoid. Don’t drink too much, don’t drink too little and on and on.
Recently I read a news article on a Canadian news website, one that was also reported in various papers, that consuming coffee might help women prevent breast cancer. The article begins by strongly stating that coffee consumption can greatly reduce the risk of breast.
Doesn’t sound too bad right?
But then the interesting thing happens where the article suggests that lifestyle choices, such as overall health and nutrition, of the women in the study, as well as whether they smoked or consumed alcohol on a regular basis, were not factored in.
Hmm. Then the article states that it’s not suggesting women go out and consume massive amounts of coffee, but that worse case, coffee couldn’t possibly contribute.
Now, curiously, that’s not how the article began. The article began with a gripping premise, that consuming our favourite caffeinated beverage can produce remarkable health benefits, and then ended with a wimper saying it wasn’t sure.
In fact all the article is really telling is us that coffee probably does not cause breast cancer. If the researchers who did the study came up with irrelevant conclusions, it makes you wonder why they bothered to publish it at all.
Original post as 21st Century Food Blogspot
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