Cookies can carry Harmful bacteria
Pathogens like salmonella can survive for at least six months in cookies and sandwich crackers, new research has found. The study was prompted by an increased number of outbreak of foodborne diseases linked to dry foods, said the researchers who wanted to see just how long bacteria that cause foodborne illness can survive in certain foods. “There have been an increased number of outbreaks of diseases associated with consumption of contaminated dry foods. We would not expect salmonella to grow in foods that have a very dry environment,” said lead researcher larry Beuchat from University of Georgia in the US. The researchers found that not only can harmful bacteria survive in dry foods, like cookie and cracker sandwiches, but they can also live for long periods of time. For the study, researchers used five different serotypes of salmonella that had been isolated from foods involved in previous foodborne outbreaks. “Isolates were from foods with very low moisture content,” Beuchat said.
How to keep prostate cancer at bay
A recent study has pointed out that men who have an orgasm every day have a lower risk of prostate cancer. The study showed that men who ejaculated more than 21 times a month had a 22 per cent lower risk of getting the disease. The study doesn’t give any reasons why the practice of ejaculation may help stave off prostate cancer, but there are theories which have been made public previously. Jennifer Rider of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital said that while these data are the most compelling to date on the potential benefit of ejaculation on prostate cancer development, they are observational data and should be interpreted cautiously.
How ‘healthy’ food can make you fat
Eating too much is typically considered as one of the prime reasons for obesity, but when people eat what they consider to be healthy food, they eat more than the recommended serving size because they associate “healthy” with less filling, say researchers. The findings suggest that the recent increase of healthy food labels may be ironically contributing to the obesity epidemic rather than reducing it. Raj Raghunathan from University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues utilised a multi-method approach to investigate the “healthy equal to less filling” intuition. Three studies converge on the idea that consumers hold an implicit belief that healthy foods are less filling than unhealthy foods. The researchers demonstrated that portraying a food as healthy as opposed to unhealthy using a front-of-package nutritional scale impacts consumer judgment and behaviour.