Mad Food Science

As you can imagine, I was quite tempted to blog about unicorns this week. Being both magical and delicious, unicorn is the perfect ingredient for any dish. However, the one that I acquired (seriously, you can find anything at St. Lawrence Market!) somehow managed to escape in the night, and all it left behind was a handful of magical rainbow turds.

I don’t know what it is, but there is just something more fun about making coloured things vs. non-coloured things. It’s the (not-so-inner) child in me. But what is food colouring? And where does it come from? And how long will my tongue be purple?

Food colouring can be either natural or artificial. The natural ones can come from all sorts of different plants, and even animals or insects. Basically, anything that can stain can be a food colouring. Beets, algae, tumeric, caramel – all natural sources of colour. And that’s fine and good, if you’re a dowdy pioneer woman who wants a pretty purple sun dress to impress the burly stable boy. But real men prefer chemicals.

Blue #1 (E133) is made of aromatic hydrocarbons from petroleum (sounds appetizing, right?), and gives the brilliant blue colour you see in “blue raspberry” products: candy, popsicles and whatnot. Only about 5% of it is absorbed by your body on its way through, so the other 95% will usually lead to blueish-green stools (yes, I’m going to be adult about this and call them “stools”). Strangely, Blue #1 can also cause an allergic reaction in people with moderate asthma.

On the positive side, the chemical structure of Blue #1 is similar to another compound (OxATP) that blocks nerve damage following spinal injury – but without toxic side effects. A study from 2009 demonstrated that rats that had Blue #1 injected into their injured spines showed improved recovery.

Red #40 (E129) was originally made from coal tar, but is now made from petroleum like it’s blue cousin (I guess that’s a step up?). It’s not very popular in Europe, where it’s either not recommended for children or outright banned, but in the USA it’s used for all sorts of food, cosmetics and drugs. Red #40 has had a scandalous life, with various studies linking it to a rise in ADHD in children (hence the banning), but since correlation does not equal causation, it stays in use in many places throughout the world because compared to other red colourings it’s not that bad. I doubt that brings much comfort to any of you parents.

Yellow #5 (E102), or tartrazine, is a lemon yellow dye from the same chemical family as Red #40. Similarly, its been linked to hyperactive disorders in children like ADHD, and like its blue cousin its been linked to allergic reactions. Many manufacturers are now trying to steer towards easily-produced natural yellow food dyes, like beta carotene, to avoid both the bad reactions and the bad press. Speaking of bad press, during the 90s, Yellow #5 was rumoured to be associated with decreased potency, testicle and penis size, and sperm count – none of which was ever scientifically proven.

Yellow #6 (E110) is actually an orange colour (think Orange Crush) called “Sunset Yellow” that’s widely used in food products. It’s why the powdered cheese on Cheetos stains everything you touch for days afterwards. When mixed with red food dyes, it creates a brown colour that’s commonly added to chocolates and caramels.

Green #3 (E143) is a sea green colour, and is the least used of all the artificial food dyes. Probably because its been linked with tumours and mutations in animal experiments. Yikes! A safer place to use Green #3 is in the molecular biology lab, where scientists use it to stain DNA and proteins to help make them visible.

Blue #2 (E132) is an indigo dye that’s also used a lot in scientific research because of its ability to indicate pH. Below pH 11.4, it’s indigo, but above pH 13.0 it turns yellow. Handy if you can’t remember which bottle is full of bleach! (hint: it’ll be the one that turns yellow, or, you know, the one that smells like bleach). In obstetrics, it can be injected into the amniotic sack to check for leaks. Fetuses and bicycle tires: more in common than you thought!

Red #3 (E127) is a cherry-pink colour that’s commonly used in Europe where Red #40 is banned, but less so in North America. It’s the dye in those tablets that the dental hygenist made you chew to show you all the plaque on your teeth (followed by an instruction/guilt session on how to brush properly).

All of this research leads me to only one conclusion:
Unicorns are on the verge of extinction because all of the food colouring they ingest (as evidenced by rainbow stools) has given them such bad ADHD that they can’t even focus for long enough to procreate.

Mind = blown. You’re welcome. 

Pop quiz, children! 
“Sfoof” is:

(a) The name of Paris Hilton’s pomeranian.
(b) A particularly fancy species of mountain goat.
(c) A house elf at Hogwarts.

This is, of course, a trick question. Though (a) and (c) might seem like reasonable guesses, sfoof is a Lebanese tumeric cake and is pretty much the only thing that comes up when you Google “tumeric cake recipe.” Thus, this week’s recipe selection was a no-brainer.

And it’s a good thing, too. Because I’ll need my precious brain power to dissect all the interesting things there are to say about tumeric. Seriously: cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, HIV, inflammation, and our old favourite antioxidation; tumeric’s got its golden yellow fingers in all of it. It’s more than I can write about in one post, so let’s just pick one for now.

The tumeric plant is a member of the ginger family, and like ginger it’s the rhizome (root) that we eat (dried and ground up, or fresh). Within tumeric, the molecule that’s getting all the buzz from researchers is called curcumin. It’s responsible for the characteristic yellow colour of tumeric, and does double duty as a food additive under the name “E100” for lending that yellow hue to other foods and products.

Curcumin (and tumeric) seems to be getting a lot of press for its anti-cancer properties, which some are claiming to be pretty plenitful. A 2009 review paper (which is where a bunch of scientists read a bunch of other scientists’ papers and combine the results into a new paper) claimed that curcumin can selectively kill cancer cells in the following ways:

That’s … a lot of ways. And it’s super confusing (unless perhaps you have a PhD in molecular biology, which I do not). Let’s look at a few and see what they mean.

• NF-kb: Curcumin (and similar compounds from ingredients like red pepper, cloves, ginger, anise, basil, rosemary, garlic and pomegranate) can interfere with this cell pathway that activates and deactivates genes. In cancer cells this pathway has gone haywire, and one way to kill them is to shut it down.
• mTOR: Curcumin was identified as having a unique mechanism for interfering with this cell signalling pathway that relates to growth. In many cancer cells the growth signals are firing out of control, leading to them growing and spreading like mad. Again: shut it down.
• DR5: Your cells have various self-destruct switches (DR5 charmingly stands for “death receptor 5”) that usually get turned off or otherwise short-circuited in cancer cells. Curcumin appears to help give that switch a hair trigger, so that the cancer cells die more easily.

That all sounds great, right? It is. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t at least look at the flip side of the coin. A 2004 study demonstrated that curcumin interferes with the p53 tumor suppressor pathway, essentially turning off one of our cells’ self-destruct switches. That’s not good; we obviously want that to be on. Another study from 2009 found that it actually increased lung tumours in people who were smokers or ex-smokers.

At the end of the day, the benefits of tumeric (in the amounts that we would normally consume in our diets) appear to far outweigh the drawbacks. I’d perhaps just advise that before you go eating heaping tablespoons of tumeric, think about the last time you had a smoke.

If you’ve watched any baking show on the Food Network or TLC (like Ace of Cakes, or god forbid, Cake Boss), you’ll be pretty familiar with fondant. It’s that crazy Play-Doh frosting that they roll out and drape cakes in to serve as a base for even more wild and crazy decorations.

It’s probably because of those shows that fondant has become a more popular ingredient for people to play with at home. It’s easy to acquire (I get mine at Bulk Barn), and once you get the hang of dusting every surface in your kitchen with icing sugar to prevent sticking, it’s easy to work with. It’s even a bit of a workout! You can totally break a sweat kneading food colouring into it to get an even and consistent colour.

But what the heck is it? Do you really want to know? Then read on.

Not surprisingly, rolled fondant (which is a bit different from poured fondant; I’ll save that for another post) is mostly sugar. The bulk of it is made of icing sugar, with a bit of pure glucose thrown in for good measure. Not surprisingly, this makes fondant ridiculously sweet. Personally, I don’t care for the taste of it; it’s too one-note sickly sweet for my liking, but when your niece is turning two and wants a Twinkle Twinkle Little Star cake, you suck it up and get out the rolling pin.

It’s held together with gelatin, which is a polymer like pectin, whose long, linking chains of molecules create a structure to keep all that sugar wrangled together. If you’re vegetarian, you can skip the gelatin (Mmmmm. Hooves.) and use agar instead. Icing sugar also has a bit of cornstarch in it, which will also make a polymer when it’s dissolved.

A couple scoops of vegetable shortening helps make the fondant soft and workable, and glycerine helps keep it moist. If left to dry out, it will solidify into a useless rock of (mostly) solid sugar, so keep your fondant tightly wrapped and sealed in an air-tight container.

That’s pretty much all there is to say about fondant. It doesn’t really have any redeeming qualities other than being awesome for kids’ birthday cakes, but hey, we’re talking about cake, so let’s not get precious about health benefits.

Next time you’re decorating a cake and want some nice, crisp and consistent shapes, grab a cookie cutter and give it a try! Unlike Play Doh, you can eat your mistakes!

A Google search for “bacon” will turn up about 180 000 000 items. Limit that to the last 24 hours, and you still get 1 110 000 items. In the last hour, there are still 21 700 items featuring bacon.

Bacon is kind of a big deal on the internet.

So, here’s one more to add to the pile of bacony goodness that’s ozzing through the arteries of everything from social media to Meat Science – the official journal of the American Meat Science Association. Is there any more delicious type of scientist than a Meat Scientist? I think not.

I had thought that I would sit down, press a few keys, and harness the power of the internet to bring you a post all about the miraculous splendor that is bacon. With so much love out there, I figured there must be some rational underpinnings to “Bacon Mania” (which, sadly, has its own Wikipedia page). But in those hundreds of millions of pages, there is little actual fact to share with you on why bacon is good beyond “it’s just gosh-darned delicious.”

I tried to keep it positive. I wanted to be the bigger man. I didn’t want to go negative and cynical. I’m not that kind of person. Oh, wait. So, without further ado, here’s what you need to know about 3 reasons bacon is bad:

FAT
Surprise! Bacon is fatty. What did you think those long white streaks were? According to the USDA, 100 g of bacon has about 36 g of fat, which doesn’t exactly break down in the most flattering way.

• 13 g of saturated fat. As I mentioned in my post on avocados (which do contain a small amount), that’s the bad one. The one that’s associated with heart disease and cancer when you eat too much of it.
• 18 g of monounsaturated fat. This one’s the “middle ground” fat. Not as bad for you as saturated fat, but not good for you like polyunsaturated fat. It’s the vigilante of dietary fats, but good or bad, there’s still a lot of it.
• 4 g of polyunsaturated fat. The good guy fat, which can actually help prevent heart disease. Too bad he’s outnumbered more than 7 to 1 by the other guys.

However, as any chef will tell you, fat = flavour, so without all that fat bacon just wouldn’t be bacon. It would be like turkey bacon, which is to say, a disappointment.

SALT
And not just any salt, but sodium nitrite. It’s kind of like salt on steroids, and it’s used in the curing and processing of all types of meats to prevent the growth of the muscle-paralyzing bacteria that causes botulism. That’s got to be a good thing, right?

Oh, wait. The only problem is that, according to our friends over at Meat Science, when you overcook foods that contain sodium nitrite, it gets converted into carcinogenic nitrosamines. And bacon is the worst culprit! Yikes.

But fear not! In the 1970s, before they discovered manscaping, it was found that adding ascorbic acid (vitamin C) or erythorbic acid (a cousin of vitamin C) to the processed food inhibits the formation of those cancerous nitrosamines. So when you see those two strange chemical names on the food label, now you’ll know they’re there to protect you when you overcook your bacon.

TRICHINOSIS
Perhaps pork’s (and therefore bacon’s) biggest black eye comes from an unappetizing little roundworm named Trichinella spiralis. A parasitic little D-bag, it can be passed to humans when pork isn’t fully cooked to the proper internal temperature (at least 144 °F). Needless to say, the results are unpleasant.

It’s mostly a problem in developing countries where hygenic pig farming isn’t enforced, but cases still pop up in North America as a result of the improper cooking of wild game (bears especially), home-raised pigs or eating undercooked or raw pork as some sort of delicacy.

So chances are that pork roast you picked up from Loblaws is probably fine, but do me a favour and grab an instant-read thermometer too, OK? Just to be safe.

Bacon is, by its very nature, a conflicted food. Deliciously conflicted. And its runaway popularity is not going to die down any time soon. The best way to deal with it, and to continue to enjoy it responsibly, is to start by teaching children about bacon when they’re young.

Like alcohol and chainsaws (but not together), bacon can be enjoyed responsibly.

As ongoing proof that this whole “social media” thing actually works, here comes today’s hot and fresh Mad Food Science by request of a certain friend who shall remain nameless.

Cardamom is a delightfully exotic spice of Indian origin that comes by its powerful and aromatic flavour by virtue of being from the ginger family of plants. It comes in two varieties, green (the traditional Indian) and black (a variety more native to Asia), and is the third most expensive spice in the world (after saffron and vanilla).

Unless you’re: (a) really into cooking and baking Indian food; or (b) a food science-obsessed blogger who collects ingredients and equipment on a scale approaching Hoarders-level tragedy, you might not have a jar in your cupboard. But, you may still be enjoying it in round-about ways; cardamom is a major flavour in chai tea, and can be part of various pre-packaged curry spice blends. 

Beyond cooking, cardamom has been used for thousands of years in the Indian traditional medicine system called Ayurveda, where its claimed to treat tooth and gum infections, sore throats, lung congestion and even tuberculosis.

What, if any, evidence is there to support these claims? Well, these have been recent studies done that support cardamom’s ability to interfere with quorum sensing in bacteria (something I’ve explained before in my post on vanilla), as well as its antioxidant ability to destroy dangerous free radicals that can cause DNA damage inside your cells. However, both of these study abstracts show that cardamom didn’t particularly knock it out of the park on either one; the other compounds tested did way better.

I was more interested by a 2009 paper, published in the Indian Journal of Biochemistry and Biophysics, claiming that 3 g of cardamom powder over 12 weeks significantly improved blood pressure, fibrinolysis (the ability to break up blood clots) and antioxidant status in patients with stage 1 primary hypertension (high blood pressure).

Great claims, right? Sure, that’s a ton of cardamom to eat, but the benefits sound worth it. Just one little problem: this study doesn’t appear to be placebo-controlled. Oh, and another one: there were only 20 subjects.

The placebo effect is a powerful thing. Our minds can trick our bodies into doing all sorts of things. For example: Head lice. Head lice. Head lice.

If you didn’t feel even a slight twinge to itch your scalp, you’re lying to me.

So, when a clinical trial doesn’t control for that and makes claims that it significantly reduced blood pressure, there’s no way to tell how much of that is due to the cardamom and how much is due to the placebo effect. What we want to see is a statistically significant different between the two groups, not in just the one.

As always, most research into the health benefits of food is still very preliminary and directional, and I don’t doubt that cardamom has something positive to offer after thousands of years as part of traditional medicine. We just need some properly designed trials to make sure that what it’s bringing to the table isn’t just all in your head.