January 2016
FOOD BITES
By Angela S. Hoover, Staff Writer
Night Milk Has More
Tryptophan
Cow milk expelled at night contains
a higher level of sleep-promoting
compounds. South Korean researchers
tested milk drawn during the day and
night. Night milk showed 24 percent
more tryptophan and nearly 10 times
the amount of melatonin than milk
drawn during the day. The researchers’
lab mice showed night milk “shortened
sleep onset and prolonged sleep duration.” The mice who had night milk
showed reduced anxiety; their behavior
was akin to mice who had been administered the anti-anxiety drug diazepam.
The results were published in the
Journal of Medicinal Food. In South
Korea, a night-milk powder product
called iNdream3, made by Synlait, was
found to reduce the time to onset sleep
and increased the deepest phase of
sleep in humans. A German company
offers a crystallized product called
Nachtmilchkristalle.
Stomach Protein May
Be Cause of Gluten
Sensitivity
A reaction to gluten in people who
don’t have celiac disease may be caused
by high levels of the stomach protein
zonulin. Zonulin normally regulates
the gut by flushing out dangerous bacteria (from food poisoning, for example), but it appears gluten can trigger
zonulin in some individuals. The study
by Giovanni Barbara, M.D., and his
team at the University of Bologna in
Italy found more than just high zonulin
levels. “In our study, gluten-sensitive
individuals who responded to a glutenfree diet had a genetic disposition to
celiac disease,” wrote Barbara. “They
had no evidence of celiac, but they did
have the vulnerable genes that puts a
person at risk of celiac.” The study was
presented at the 23rd United European
Gastroenterology Week in Barcelona
this December.
New Dietary
Guidelines Soon to Be
Announced
U.S. food guidelines are updated
every five years, and they affect everything from school lunch menus and
government agricultural subsidies to
aid programs for low-income families and research priorities at health
agencies. The Dietary Guidelines
Advisory Committee is recommending Americans watch their intake of all
meats, including lean options such as
chicken. It is expected the committee
will no longer recommend limiting
cholesterol intake, but the new guidelines will likely recommend a drastic
reduction in sugar. The committee
recommends four to nine teaspoons of
sugar per day, depending on one’s body
mass index. To put this in perspective,
an 8-ounce cup of low-fat strawberry
yogurt has 6 teaspoons of sugar, and
the average American consumes as
much as 30 teaspoons of sugar a day.
Drop Your Nutella
Knife – Now There’s
Chocolate Slices
A Japanese company, Bourbon,
has created chocolate slices that are
individually wrapped, just like cheese
&
35
slices. These slices can be put in crepes
and cakes, on crackers and bread, in
between pancake stacks, wrappe