It's feeding time at the weird science zoo

April 19 2009, 5:20pm

Carbohydrates help athletic performance, even when you don't ingest them: Put a bunch of cyclists in a time trial, and you'd expect giving them a supply of carbohydrates would increase their performance. What you wouldn't necessarily expect is that the performance would still go up if they didn't ingest anything. It turns out that simply rinsing the mouth with carbohydrate solutions—even when the carbohydrate involved was tasteless—increased performance in ways that artificial sweeteners can't. The researchers verified a difference in response to the three classes of chemicals using functional MRI.

Knowledge is not power: Anyone who has spent some time in the US in recent years has undoubtedly lived through one of the episodes where a commonly used food product—most recently it was peanuts—gets contaminated by some sort of nasty bacterial pathogen. Researchers at Rutgers University have now done a survey to find out how consumers actually respond to the warnings issued by government agencies, such as the FDA. To an extent, the response is a mix of confusion and indifference. My favorite part of the report is the flow chart on page six, where you can follow the flow of questions past the oblivious and cautious to get to those 169 individuals who actually knew the precise type of tomatoes involved in a recent health scare and ate them anyway.

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