Fruit
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Purple Tomatoes – Better-tasting and Longer-lasting?
Tomatoes, said to be the world’s most popular fruit, can be made both better-tasting and longer-lasting thanks to a research with purple GM varieties. “Working with GM tomatoes that are different to normal fruit only by the addition of a specific compound, allows us to pinpoint exactly how to breed in valuable traits,” said Professor [...]
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Keeping Fruit, Vegetables and Cut Flowers Fresh Longer
New technology offers the promise of reducing billions of dollars of losses that occur each year from the silent, invisible killer of fruits, vegetables and cut flowers — a gas whose effects are familiar to everyone who has seen bananas and other fruit ripen too quickly and rot. Nicolas Keller, Marie-Noëlle Ducamp, Didier Robert and [...]
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Why Strawberries Smell Like Strawberries
With the upcoming summer fresh strawberries start to appear on the shelves. We can already smell them using our imagination but scientists from the Technische Universität München (TUM) decided to find out what gives strawberries their characteristic flavor. It is not just our sense of taste that determines what a foodstuff “tastes” like. In fact, [...]
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Fruit Salad Increases Sales and Consumption in School Cafeterias
Kids love to eat fruit in ready-to-eat bite-sized pieces, fruit salads. In most school settings, the fruit is served whole, which could be the cause that children are taking fruits but not eating them. Most people believe that children avoid fruit because of the taste and allure of alternative packaged snacks. A study by Cornell [...]
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Eating an Apple a Day Might Help Keep Cardiologists Away
In a study of healthy, middle-aged adults, consumption of one apple a day for four weeks lowered by 40 percent blood levels of a substance linked to hardening of the arteries. Taking capsules containing polyphenols, a type of antioxidant found in apples, had a similar, but not as large, effect. The study, funded by an apple industry group, [...]
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Fruit Flies on Methamphetamine Die Largely as a Result of Anorexia
A new study finds that fruit flies exposed to methamphetamine drastically reduce their food intake and increase their physical activity, just as humans do. The study, which tracked metabolic and behavioral changes in fruit flies on meth, indicates that starvation is a primary driver of methamphetamine-related death in the insects. The abuse of methamphetamine can [...]
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Avocado Oil
Researchers have found that consuming fruit bolsters cells’ power centers against harmful free radicals. Atmospheric oxygen facilitated the evolution and complexity of terrestrial organisms, including human beings, because it allowed nutrients to be used more efficiently by those organisms, which in turn were able to generate more energy. However, as we find out more about [...]
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Lime Juice Makes Drinking Water Safer
Researchers found that adding lime juice to water that is treated with a solar disinfection method removed detectable levels of harmful bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) significantly faster than solar disinfection alone. The results are featured in the April 2012 issue of American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. “For many countries, access to clean drinking [...]
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Ripe Cantaloupe Determined By An Electronic Nose
Researchers from the University of California, Davis might have found a way to make imperfectly ripe fruit a thing of the past. The researches evaluated an electronic nose to see if it can differentiate maturity of fruit, specifically melons. The goal is to develop a tool that can be used post-harvest to better evaluate produce, [...]
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How to Improve Pesticide Efficiency – a New Study
MU researchers are studying the molecular structure of the pesticide with active ingredient, methyl iodide, is a known carcinogen to determine if the product could be made more efficient and safer for those living near, and working in, treated fields. The pesticide was approved for use on fruit and vegetable crops, mainly in California and [...]
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Citrus Fruit May Reduce Stroke Risk
Eating higher amounts of a compound in citrus fruits, especially oranges and grapefruit, may lower ischemic stroke risk. A compound in citrus fruits may lower your stroke risk, according to research reported in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. Women who ate high amounts of the compound had a 19% lower risk of ischemic stroke [...]
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Fuel from Fruit Waste
Mushy tomatoes, brown bananas and overripe cherries – to date, waste from wholesale markets has ended up on the compost heap at best. In future it will be put to better use: Researchers have developed a new facility that ferments this waste to make methane, which can be used to power vehicles. Drivers who fill [...]
