Lifeboat Foundation

Engineering Food: The Impossible Whopper.

“Now, let’s compare the estrogen hormone in an impossible whopper to the whopper made from hormone implanted beef. The impossible whopper has 44 mg of estrogen and the whopper has 2.5 ng of estrogen. Now let me refresh your metric system. There are 1 million nanograms (ng) in one milligram (mg). That means an impossible whopper has 18 million times as much estrogen as a regular whopper. Just six glasses of soy milk per day has enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male. That’s the equivalent of eating four impossible whoppers per day. You would have to eat 880 pounds of beef from an implanted steer to equal the amount of estrogen in one birth control pill.”

The impossible whopper is being advertised by Burger King as a plant based alternative to the whopper. When food manufacturers started talking about making artificial meat, I, too, thought it would be impossible to make a hamburger cheaply enough to make it competitive. You see, I assumed that they would have to buy the individual amino acids (the building blocks for protein) and chemically string them together in the proper order, then remove the reagents (chemicals needed to cause the chain reactions) and then add something to give it the right textures.

Continue reading “Stangle: Impossible burgers are made of what?” »

Healthy Japanese foods make it easy to create a vibrant plate that resembles a nutritional masterpiece. The residents of Okinawa, a Japanese prefecture comprising more than 150 islands in the East China Sea, enjoy the longest life expectancy in the world, according to Blue Zones. On the islands, with a population said to include the largest proportion of people over 100, women and men can expect to live 84 and 90 years, respectively.

It’s no secret that diet plays a major role in longevity. The healthy Japanese foods centenarians in Okinawa reach for each day include a variety of riches from the ocean and the earth.

Continue reading “7 healthy foods Japanese centenarians eat each day for longevity” »

How can you lose dramatic weight, ease chronic conditions, and stay healthier longer? Flip the switch on your metabolism with intermittent fasting, protein cycling, and keto!

Within each of us is an ancient mechanism that eliminates toxic materials, initiates fat burning, and protects cells from becoming dysfunctional—or turning cancerous. It’s called autophagy, and when it’s turned on, the complex operation not only can slow down the aging process, it can optimize biological function as a whole, helping to stave off all manner of diseases and affording us the healthy life spans we never thought possible. It’s the body’s ultimate switch to life.

So how can we positively activate this switch? How frequently should we fast and for how long? Which foods dial up autophagy or, conversely, turn it down? How much exercise and what types are recommended? What’s the sweet spot between intermittent fasting, protein cycling, and ketogenic eating?

This is the fourth instalment in a four-part series examining the brewing US-China war over the development and deployment of artificial intelligence technology.

China has had success with AI and surveillance, but when it comes to social issues such as education, health care and agriculture, there is still a ways to go.

Continue reading “China dreams of becoming an AI utopia – here’s the reality” »

Mice fed a plant-rich diet are less susceptible to gastrointestinal (GI) infection from a pathogen such as the one currently under investigation for a widespread E. coli outbreak tied to romaine lettuce, UT Southwestern researchers report. A strain of E. coli known as EHEC, which causes debilitating and potentially deadly inflammation in the colon with symptoms such as bloody diarrhea and vomiting, is implicated in several foodborne outbreaks worldwide each year.

“There has been a lot of hearsay about whether a plant-based diet is better for intestinal health than a typical Western diet, which is higher in oils and protein but relatively low in fruits and vegetables,” says Vanessa Sperandio, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and biochemistry at UT Southwestern. “So we decided to test it.”

Her study on a mouse model of EHEC is published this week in Nature Microbiology.

Research led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has uncovered a new process that may help explain how Type 2 diabetes develops. In tests on live mice and human cells in the lab, the team found a new mechanism besides insulin resistance and high glucose levels that triggers pancreatic cells to begin overproducing insulin.

Type 2 diabetes is the form of the disease that’s usually a result of lifestyle choices, such as poor diet and not enough exercise. It involves a kind of vicious cycle of insulin – beta cells in the pancreas produce too much insulin, which causes the body to become resistant to it. That in turn means the beta cells could produce even more to compensate.

It was long thought that high glucose levels – most commonly caused by eating too much sugary and fatty foods – was the trigger for the beta cells to begin overproducing insulin. But it’s also been shown in the past that even beta cells isolated in a lab dish can over-secrete insulin, without glucose playing a part.

Certain foods, drinks, and behaviors could be filling you up with gas.

Intermittent fasting means interspersing periods of abstaining from food with periods of eating regularly. You could skip breakfast and eat a late lunch, for example, or fast all day long, once or twice a week.

The research suggests that intermittent fasting is a simple, effective life hack for solving many age-related problems, but the evidence is far from conclusive.

“There really is no one weird trick for the perfect diet for everyone,” John Newman, geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco told Inverse. Science is leading us toward the idea of maintaining some flexibility in our body’s metabolism, he said.

TV shows and fiction aside, the present-day examples of basic AI are Google Voice, Cortana, Alexa, Siri, and chatbots. However, AI isn’t just limited to voice assistants, it’s turning tables in other domains and industries as well. Several restaurants, for instance, have bots for room service, serving food and carrying luggage.

Let’s take a look at some interesting and mind-bending stats and facts on this prevalent technology to give you a better idea of the direction the market is headed.

Interesting stats and facts on artificial intelligence.