If you would enjoy a few moments away from the pressing issues of the day — the shootings in McComb, inflation, the threat of a recession, the state welfare scandal, the persistent coronavirus, Ukraine — an editorial about snacks sounds awfully tasty.
The first snack is popcorn. The University of Nebraska’s Food for Health Center reported this month that research into genetic variations of the popular snack showed that popcorn has the potential to improve your health.
Nebraska’s sports teams are called the Cornhuskers for a good reason: It is the state’s cash crop. The state’s farmers plant more than 60,000 acres of popcorn each year and produce almost 120 million pounds of it.
Nationally, Americans eat more than 13 billion quarts of popcorn per year, an average of 40 quarts per person. Which apparently got a researcher to wondering: How would different strains of popcorn affect the body?
A Nebraska Ph.D. student used new varieties developed by a professor to explore the issue of how they affected human intestinal microbes. The new varieties were based on “naturally occurring changes within a small number of genes that influence the amount and kind of protein in the popcorn kernels.”
The result was unexpected. Compared to the popcorn people eat today, the new varieties induced the intestinal microbes to produce much more of something called butyrate, which a press release said is “a short-chain fatty acid shown to promote health in humans.”
Further, the microbes known to produce butyrate became more abundant compared to those exposed to regular popcorn.
Here’s the real-world potential of this research: Increased production of butyrate can strengthen the intestinal lining, improve metabolism and help with appetite control. Other studies say more butyrate also can reduce cholesterol levels and disease susceptibility.
The work involved in vitro fermentation instead of actually giving new popcorn strains to people. But Nebraska Food for Health researchers hope to begin clinical studies of these results in the future. It will be interesting to see what turns up in the popcorn of the future.
And now to another fine snack: Skittles, for which the old Lay’s potato chip slogan, “Nobody can eat just one,” properly applies.
It turns out that a California man this month sued the company that makes Skittles, claiming its continued use of titanium dioxide as a food coloring agent makes the candy unfit for human consumption.
Humans of all ages enjoy tasting the rainbow that is inside any bag of Skittles. So going to court seems like a fairly extreme reaction.
However, the company said in 2016 that it would phase out artificial coloring, including titanium dioxide. It hasn’t done it yet for Skittles.
While Europe has banned that chemical, the United States has not. Hopefully the company follows through with its promise to use a natural coloring and keep Skittles lovers happy.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
