Interesting Facts

According to the Professor Nigel Hunt at the Royal College of Surgeons, “cake culture” in the UK workplace is fuelling the obesity epidemic and contributing to poor dental health. (As a healthy alternative they are suggesting that workers should bring fruit platters into the office instead of doughnuts, cookies and biscuits. He said, “Cake culture poses difficulties for those who are trying their hardest to lose weight or become healthier - how many of us have begun such diets only to cave in to the temptation of the doughnuts, cookies or the triple chocolate biscuits?” I agree in principal, but I wouldn't want to be the one to bring a box of apples to work on my birthday, I don't want to be known as Lynney no friends.)

Surprise, surprise, fruit is good for you (I can hear my mother now - I told you so.) According to researchers at Harvard if you want to lose weight, you should stop eating peas, potatoes and sweetcorn, and start eating cauliflower, prunes and blueberries. (Surprisingly fruit was twice as good as veg, with every extra portion a day leading to around half a pound of flab being shed over four years. Prunes, apples, pears, strawberries, raisins and grapes, also scored high on the weight loss scale. Blueberries were actually the number 1 fat burner.  I can't stand them, but I need to shed some weight, so maybe I'll just have to take my medicine.)

According to a study by BUPA, 80% of Brits believe families today are missing out on creating happy memories by not eating meals together. (The top foods that invoked childhood memories were:- Ice cream Roast dinner Fish and chips Apple crumble Bangers and mash Shepherd’s pie Spaghetti Bolognese Strawberries and cream Fruit salad Bakewell tart For me it's sherry trifle.)

According to Epidemiologists at Cambridge University the greater the access someone has to takeaway food, the higher the BMI (body mass index) and their odds of becoming obese are nearly doubled. (Several local authorities in the UK have already introduced restrictions on fast-food outlets, around schools or in places where there are already lots of takeaways, but now UK researchers are calling on a restriction on the number of fast-food outlets around offices and homes to help combat the obesity epidemic in the UK. How about fast food salads and fruit? Fruit is pretty fast food.)

Public Health England is considering including foods which have at least one portion of fruit or veg to their 5-a-day recommendation. (This would mean ham and pineapple pizza could count as part of a healthy diet, along with tinned soups and tinned fruit. I wonder if black forest gateau will count. After all, it has cherries in it.)

According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , humans started drinking alcohol about 10 million years ago. (They discovered that a single genetic mutation 10 million years ago endowed our human ancestors with an enhanced ability to break down ethanol, probably from eating fermenting fruit. I guess it was their superpower.) 

According to analysis by the Economist, the popularity of apples has outstripped that of oranges. (Denmark consumes the most apples per head (30kg per person per year), and Morocco has the highest orange, tangerine and mandarin consumption (32 kg per person per year). I bet Danish doctors aren't that happy.)

Sticking to a fruity theme; Harrods are selling cherries at £4.65 a punnet. (Why is this interesting? Well there are only 25 cherries in a punnet you can do the math. That's a whopping £1.65 a cherry. Seemingly the French "Glamour-edoa" cherries, are supposedly the only cherries grown naturally that are ripe enough to eat this early.  That said, my neighbour is picking cherries off his tree as I type.  I wonder if he'll sell me one for a couple of Euros. As the Daily Mail wrote, "That's cherry expensive".) http://www.glamour-edoa.com

According to Professor Hugh Pennington, professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, 'bags-for-life' should never be used to carry raw meat or vegetables with soil on them. (He says bacteria can be transferred from the meat to the bag and then onto other products which are eaten raw - such as fruit - causing food poisoning, and raw meat should be carried in plastic bags which are then binned. In a study by University of Pennsylvania it was found that since San Francisco banned the use of plastic bags in 2007, hospitalisations and deaths from food-borne illnesses have nearly doubled. Penn Law professor, Jonathan Klick, found that eight per cent of reusable shopping bags contain E.coli and that 97 per cent of people admit to never washing their reusable bags. Even more scary is that they claim that washing the bags or cleaning them with antibacterial sprays is not sufficient.  This makes me feel a bit sad, because I hate plastic bags, I regularly wash my canvas b...

Researchers at the University of Warwick have created chocolate with half the fat content replaced with fruit juice. (Using apple, orange and cranberry juice droplets, they have replaced half the fat content in the chocolate but say they have managed to retain the same velvety feel as normal bars. Does this mean I can count it as one of my five a day?)

According to a study by Dr. Honglei Chen, an investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, there is a link between soft drinks and depression. (Participants in the study who drank more than four servings of fizzy drinks per day were 30 percent more likely to develop depression than participants who didn't, but it's not just fizzy pop, people who stuck with fruit squash had a 38 percent higher risk than people who didn't drink sweetened drinks. And it's not just sugary drinks, the research also showed that people who drank low-calorie diet drinks, iced teas, and fruit squash were at a slightly higher risk of depression too, and the artificial sweetener aspartame may be to blame. It does make me wonder though: do sugary drinks cause depression, or do depressed people try to cheer themselves up with a sweet drink? The good news is that drinking unsweetened coffee can lower the risk of depression. I'm a happy go lucky person, guess what I d...

Aubergines were originally called "vatinganah" in Sanskrit, which means literally ‘fart, go away.’ Original Photo by Irene Kightley   CC by SA 2.0 (From Sanskrit, the word and the fruit travelled, morphed into Persian as badingan, then into Arabic as al-badhinjan.  The Spanish borrowed the term thinking that the Arabic definite article "al" was part of the word, so it went into the Catalan language as alberginia, where the French later picked it up as aubergine, and the English borrowed the word in the late 1700s. 1794, from Fr. aubergine, "fruit of the eggplant" (Solanum esculentum), dim. of auberge "a kind of peach," variant of alberge, from Sp. alberchigo "apricot" [OED]. Klein derives the French word from Catalan alberginera, from Arabic al-badinjan"the eggplant," from Pers. badin-gan, from Skt. vatin-ganah. So aubergine really means "fart go away". Americans know it as an eggplant, which IMHO isn...

A study by the University of Warwick has found that people who eat seven – rather than the government recommended five – portions of fruit and veg a day are the happiest in the UK. (They found mental well-being rose with the number of daily portions of fruit and vegetables people ate. Well-being peaked at seven portions a day.  I wonder if it's something to do with being regular?)

UK supermarket giant ASDA is going back to pounds and ounces on fruit and veg for the first time in 16 years. (Customers asked for the return of imperial measures, as seven in ten shoppers said they still get confused by metric weights. Now they will be able to buy a 1lb punnet of strawberries, which under EU laws would weigh 453.39 grams.)

The pineapple wasn't known in Europe until 1493, when Christopher Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Guadaloupe and  the sailors ate, enjoyed and recorded the curious new fruit. (But the pineapple wasn't cultivated successfully in European hothouses, and pineapple pits, until around 1720. It became associated with great wealth, and you can see the pineapple motif on many historic buildings and in art and carvings etc.  It was so highly regarded that King Charles posed with his gardener John Rose, as he presented King Charles with the first pineapple grown in England.)

According to research published in Nature Genetics, the modern domestic apple's wild ancestor – Malus sieversii – did not grow in the Garden of Eden, but the mountains of southern Kazakhstan. (In Western Europe, the "forbidden fruit" is often depicted as an apple, because of a misunderstanding of, or perception of intentional dual meaning in, the Latin malus, which as an adjective means evil, but as a noun means apple. In the Vulgate, Genesis 2:17 describes the tree as "de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali/the wood, indeed, of good and evil knowledge" Genesis 2:17 ("mali" is the genitive of "malus"). The larynx in the human throat, noticeably more prominent in males, was consequently called an Adam's apple, from a notion that it was caused by the forbidden fruit sticking in Adam's throat as he swallowed.)

India's record-breaking batsman Sachin Tendulkar has had a new variety of mango named after him. (Farmer Kalimullah Khan has created a hybrid version of the mango and has named it Sachin, in honour of his cricketing hero. It's a nice gesture, but I can't get the image of Tom Cruise yelling "Show me the money!" out of my head.) Full story here:- http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20100430/tod-mango-tribute-to-india-s-tendulkar-7f81b96.html

According to Maria Thun, a German great-grandmother, the taste of wine can vary from day to day. (A calendar that Frau Thun first published in the 1950s categorises days as "fruit", "flower", "leaf" or "root", according to the Moon and stars. Wine is best on fruit days, followed by flower, leaf and root days. The worst day is marked as "unfavourable" in the calendar. Even businesses have started to take this seriously Marks and Spencers has started drawing attention to the calendar in its wine magazine and advises customers to avoid the dreaded ‘root’ days when opening special bottles.)

An orchard is a garden or an area of land used for the cultivation of fruit or nut trees. (Orchards comprise fruit or nut-producing trees grown for commercial production. Orchards are also sometimes a feature of large gardens, where they serve an aesthetic as well as a productive purpose. According to some people you need 15 trees to make an orchard, but others say you only need 5.)

The European Union has scrapped rules on fruit and vegetable size. (Twenty-six fruits and vegetables are now free to grow their own way. But ten — including peaches, pears and tomatoes — still have to watch the scales. I shall look forward to funny shaped carrots going back on the shelf.)