Eva Almenar, with MSU's School of Packaging, focused on onions, one of the highest-volume vegetables sold worldwide. Her team's results, featured in a recent issue of International Journal of Food Microbiology, show that improvements can enhance the safety and improve the quality of the ubiquitous vegetable.

A 2014 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed a decline in the prevalence of obesity among 2- to 5-year-olds between 2003-2004 (a 13 percent child obesity rate) and 2011-2012 (a 7 percent child obesity rate); however, the study did not identify the health and demographic factors linked to the decline. Rice and Temple researchers replicated the CDC's study with 1,900 children between the ages of 2 and 5 in an attempt to explain the changes. Their discovery: The 6 percent drop in childhood obesity cannot be explained by changes in maternal or child health behaviors such as smoking cessation, breast-feeding or physical activity. - See more at: http://news.rice.edu/2016/05/18/drop-in-childhood-obesity-cannot-be-explained-by-health-behaviors-2/#sthash.Oq6LrjTz.dpuf

Children who had a diet that included cow's milk products, egg and peanut before age one were less likely to develop sensitization to the corresponding foods, according to new research presented at the ATS 2016 International Conference. Early introduction of eggs appeared to be especially beneficial, as it decreased the risk of sensitization to any of the three tested foods.

Everything you eat or drink affects your intestinal bacteria, and is likely to have an impact on your health. That is the finding of a large-scale study led by RUG/UMCG geneticist Cisca Wijmenga into the effect of food and medicine on the bacterial diversity in the human gut, which is published this Friday in the prestigious research journal Science. In this study researchers collected stool samples from more than 1100 people taking part in the LifeLines programme, which is monitoring the health of 165,000 residents of the Northern Netherlands. The samples were used to analyse the DNA of the bacteria and other organisms that live in the gut. In addition to stools, the study collected information on the participants' diet, medicine-use and health. This study is unique in that it focussed on a group of normal people whereas previous research was frequently focussed on patients with a specific illness. Further, the study covered an exceptionally large group of people and studied their gut DNA in detail. "Normally researchers only investigate one particular region of DNA in which different groups of bacteria can be distinguished," Wijmenga explains. "We have mapped all the bacterial DNA to gain much more detailed information about bacteria types."

We have all seen messages from the "food police" telling us that sugary snacks are bad. But is it possible that seeing these messages actually make us more likely to eat sugary snacks? Researchers at Arizona State University, Nguyen Pham, Naomi Mandel, and Andrea Morales, show, in new research published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, that these messages backfire among dieters. They find that dieters ate 39% more cookies after seeing a "food police" style message that says, "All sugary snacks are bad" than those who saw a positive message."