I opened the door to pick up my morning Gazette and found a package with an anonymous note. “Can you please discuss in a column whether this is good to take?” Inside was a bottle of “VegeGreens.”...
Back in the early 70s, just as I was developing an interest in the chemistry of food, I came across a witty quote by Mark Twain. “Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and...
Science is as a quest for knowledge. Sometimes it ends with a clear-cut result, often not. The Earth goes around the sun. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. The speed of light is 299,792,458...
Make no mistake about it: General Mills’s introduction of Cheerios sporting the label “Not made with genetically modified ingredients” is a mere marketing ploy and has nothing to do with health or...
The bloggers are abuzz about a paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine that after reviewing 72 major studies found no relationship between saturated fat intake and heart disease. The reaction was...
A couple of years ago the Montreal Gazette had a stunning headline: “Floss or Die!” it screamed on the front page. Another sensationalized piece of journalism, I thought. Not flossing may make you...
The strikes against meat keep piling up. This time it's a study implicating carnitine, a compound found in meat and dairy products, as a factor in heart disease. High cholesterol, hypertension,...
Not all saturated fats are created equal. They have a different effect on blood cholesterol depending on the number of carbon atoms in their molecular structure. Lauric acid, the predominant fatty...
When is a substance a food and when is it a drug? That may sound like a simple question but the answer can be complicated. Suppose you take some rice, inoculate it with a type of yeast, let it...
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