• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Earth Wise

A look at our changing environment.

Hide Search
You are here: Home / Archives for beverage

beverage

New Nutrition Labels

February 26, 2019 By EarthWise 1 Comment

Food and beverage packaging in this country has included a Nutrition Facts panel for nearly 25 years.  Over 700,000 products have the labels which provide consumers with information like serving sizes, calories per serving, ingredients, and nutritional content.

Surveys indicate that 77 percent of all U.S. adults claim to use the labels at least some of the time.  Whether the labels are actually useful is somewhat debatable.  A couple of years ago, the FDA released a proposal to update the labels to make them more useful and to reflect more recent nutritional research.  The new labels are finally going to be implemented and food manufacturers with annual sales exceeding $10 million have until January of 2020 to update their packaging with the new labels.

One of the biggest changes is that the “serving size” section of the label will be changed to more accurately reflect the actual portions consumed by the typical American.  For example, a 20-ounce soft drink will now be labeled as a single serving because most people will drink the whole bottle in one sitting.

The new labels will no long list the amounts of Vitamin A and C, because recent research shows most Americans are not deficient in these nutrients.  Instead, the amount of Vitamin D and potassium will be listed, two nutrients lacking in many diets.  New labels will also show amounts of “added sugars”, defined as caloric sweeteners with no nutritional value. The new labels will also display the calories per serving in much large type making that piece of information far more noticeable.

There is surely more to be done to make food labeling more transparent and useful for consumers, but the new changes at least seem to be in the right direction.

**********

Web Links

Nutrition Labels Get a Makeover: Will It Make a Difference?

Photo, posted September 9, 2014, courtesy of Mike Mozart via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The Bitter Truth About Caffeine

January 7, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Coffee will be impacted by the changing climate

Black coffee has a bitter taste. Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances.  By the logic of evolution, we should therefore want to spit coffee out, but obviously it doesn’t work that way.

Caffeine itself has a particularly bitter taste.  Surprisingly, a new study at Northwestern University has found that the more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink. That sensitivity is actually a genetic variant.

So, one would think that people who are especially sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee.  The counter intuitive result suggests that coffee consumers acquire a taste or an ability to detect caffeine as a result of the learned positive reinforcement (in other words, the buzz) elicited by caffeine.  People with a heightened ability to taste coffee’s bitterness learn to associate good things with it.

The study also found in contrast that people sensitive to the bitter flavor of a different compound called 6-n-propylthiouracil (known as PROP)avoided coffee as well as red wine.

The study made use of applied Mendelian randomization, a technique commonly used in disease epidemiology, to test the causal relationship between bitter taste and beverage consumption in more than 400,000 men and women in the United Kingdom.

These results shed some light on the disdain many coffee drinkers have for decaf coffee.  It may not be just the lack of buzz that turns them off.  Some of them with the right genes may be missing that extra bit of bitterness that alerts them that something good is about to happen.

**********

Web Links

Why we shouldn’t like coffee, but we do

Photo, posted May 22, 2009, courtesy of Olle Svensson via Flickr.  

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

A CO2 Vacuum Cleaner

July 13, 2017 By EarthWise

https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/EW-07-13-17-A-CO2-Vacuum-Cleaner.mp3

A new carbon capture plant, sitting on top of a waste incineration facility near Zurich, Switzerland, is now sucking CO2 out of the air to sell to its first customer.  The plant opened on May 31, and is the first commercial enterprise of its kind.

[Read more…] about A CO2 Vacuum Cleaner

Primary Sidebar

Recent Episodes

  • Energy From Rice Straw | Earth Wise
  • California Flooding | Earth Wise
  • The Race For EV Batteries | Earth Wise
  • Turning Carbon Into Stone | Earth Wise
  • Tracking Global Forest Changes | Earth Wise

WAMC Northeast Public Radio

WAMC/Northeast Public Radio is a regional public radio network serving parts of seven northeastern states (more...)

Copyright © 2023 ·