Huat Zai

Rocky Masters sucks to begin with, please don't go back.

Hope they can survive the butt hurt that ah gong has been dishing out to hawkers

They have their own chicken farm to supply the young roasters to their restaurant, that's near to impossible here

Meanwhile, in some authoritarian island...

It's more than likely you still have some of the habits around eating and cooking that you learned from adults when you were young, maybe without even realising. Perhaps you never lick food off your knife, or you always throw salt over your shoulder to ward off evil spirits. Many of these quirks are probably nothing more than superstition, but one in particular may have been unknowingly prescient a few decades ago, and grounded in a scientific discovery that was yet to happen. In 2002, scientists at the University of Stockholm discovered that it might actually be wise to scrape the burnt bits off your toast. They found that a substance called acrylamide forms when we apply heat over 120C (248F) to certain foods – including potato, bread, biscuits, cereal, and coffee – and its sugar content reacts with the amino acid asparagine. This process is called the Maillard reaction, and it causes food to brown and gives it that distinctive flavour. But scientists have found that doses of acrylamide is carcinogenic in animals, but only in doses much higher than those in human food. Acrylamide could also increase the risk of humans developing cancer, especially children, according to the European Food Safety Authority. But researchers looking into the effects on humans have not yet been able to come to a definite conclusion. "After almost 30 years of its classification as a 'probable human carcinogen', there is still inconsistent evidence of its definite carcinogenicity in humans. However, if we continue to do further studies on humans, we might have adequate data to change acrylamide's classification to a human carcinogen," says Fatima Saleh, associate professor of medical laboratory sciences at Beirut Arab University in Lebanon. You might also like: The hidden risks of cooking your food How processed foods became so unhealthy Do students really eat that badly? Scientists are sure, however, that acrylamide is neurotoxic to humans, which means it can affect the nervous system. The exact cause for this are still not fully understood, but among the theories are that acrylamide attacks structural proteins within nerve cells or may inhibit anti-inflammatory systems that protect nerve cells from damage. The toxic effects of acrylamide have been shown to be cumulative, which means that consuming a small amount of acrylamide over a long period of time could increase the risk of it affecting organs in the longer term. More specifically, evidence from animal studies suggests that long-term exposure to dietary acrylamide could also increase the risk of neurodegenerative disease, such as dementia, and may be associated with neurodevelopmental disorders in children, says Federica Laguzzi, assistant professor of cardiovascular and nutritional epidemiology at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The learned response to remove burned patches from food might have some long-term health benefits (Credit: Matthew Ashmore/EyeEm/Getty Images) "Acrylamide passes through all tissue, including the placenta, because it has a low molecular weight and is soluble in water," says Laguzzi, who has found a link between higher acrylamide intake in pregnant people and the lower birth weight, head circumference and length of their newborn babies. The potential mechanism behind acrylamide's role in increasing the risk of cancer in humans isn't yet known. Leo Schouten, an associate professor of epidemiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, has a theory why it might happen. After the 2002 discovery of the presence of acrylamide in our food by Swedish researchers, the Dutch Food Authority contacted investigators of the Netherlands Cohort Study on Diet and Cancer, including Schouten, to investigate whether dietary acrylamide was a risk for humans. Schouten and colleagues tried to capture an estimate of how much acrylamide people were consuming based on a questionnaire. The mechanism behind acrylamide's potential cancer-causing effect could be related to hormones They discovered that the variation between people with low and high exposure in an elderly Dutch population could be explained mainly by one product popular in the Netherlands called ontbijtkoek, roughly translated as "breakfast cake", which was extremely high in acrylamide due to the use of baking soda in the production. They investigated the link between non-smokers' acrylamide intake (as smoking also contains the substance) and all cancers, and found a higher risk of endometrial and ovarian cancers in women with high exposure to acrylamide. They have also found, in further studies, a slight link between acrylamide intake and kidney cancer. However, these findings are yet to be confirmed by any other researchers. The closest is a US population study, which published findings in 2012 suggesting an increased risk of ovarian and endometrial cancer among non-smoking post-menopausal women who consumed high amounts of acrylamide. Of course, there could be other reasons for this – people who eat high levels of acrylamide might also follow other lifestyle choices that put them at a higher risk. Other studies haven't found an association, or saw weaker associations. But it's unclear whether the association Schouten and his team found was incorrect, or if other studies weren't able to measure acrylamide intake accurately. The mechanism behind acrylamide's potential cancer-causing effect could be related to hormones, Schouten says, because certain hormones have been associated with an increased risk of cancer, especially female genital cancers like endometrial and ovarian cancer. Simply placing potatoes in water for 10 minutes can massively reduce the amount of acrylamide produced when the food is cooked (Credit: Christine Rose Photography) "Acrylamide may affect oestrogen or progesterone, which would explain the female cancers, but this hasn't been proven," says Schouten. Laboratory studies involving rats have also found links between acrylamide intake and cancer in mammary glands, thyroid gland, testes and the uterus, which also suggest a hormonal pathway, but this does not automatically mean a similar risk to humans. In 2010, the Joint Food and Agriculture Organization/World Health Organization Expert Committee on Food Additives suggested that more long-term studies are needed to further understand the link between acrylamide and cancer. It did, however, support efforts to reduce acrylamide levels in food. But one of the biggest challenges is accurately measuring how much acrylamide we consume. "It's well established that acrylamide is genotoxic and can cause cancer in animals, but the association between acrylamide and cancer in humans is still unclear," says Laguzzi. "Most epidemiological studies are performed with acrylamide intake measured through dietary questionnaires that rely on people's reporting, which can bias the results." While Schouten believes he was able to accurately measure acrylamide in people's diets, not everyone agreed, including many toxicologists. Another way to measure acrylamide intake is by measuring biomarkers in urine and blood, but this hasn't found anything concrete, either, Schouten says. We could have protective measures that limit the increased risks associated with our overdone chips It's important to do more research where acrylamide is measured with biomarkers, especially through blood, as this shows acrylamide intake over a longer period of time than urine, says Laguzzi. Acrylamide has been measured through biomarkers in US studies, but only very recently. One study from 2022, using data spanning a decade, shows a link between acrylamide intake and deaths from cancer, but it couldn't conclude which cancers. One reason there may not be much conclusive evidence that the levels of acrylamide in our diets can increase the risk of cancer is because we could have protective measures that limit the increased risks associated with our overdone chips. Laguzzi has found no link between non-gynaecological cancer risk and acrylamide intake in her research summarising the population evidence of this association. She says this could be because either humans have good reparative mechanisms to help prevent both potential carcinogenic and neurotoxic effects, or because these studies were performed using inaccurate measures of dietary acrylamide exposure. More long-term studies are needed to find the link between burned foods and cancers (Credit: Grandriver/Getty Images) "Also, we don't just eat acrylamide on its own. It's in food, where there could also be other components, like antioxidants, that can help prevent the toxic mechanisms," she says. Despite the absence of solid research showing the risks to humans of eating acrylamide, the food industry is taking measures to reduce it in our foods. "The EU is in the process of setting maximum allowable levels for acrylamide in food, and that could have serious repercussions for the food supply chain," says Nigel Halford, whose research is helping farmers to reduce the potential for acrylamide formation in products made from wheat. While acrylamide isn't found in plants, asparagine, which is the substance that turns into acrylamide when heated, is. "Acrylamide affects quite a wide range of foods that come from cereal grains, so it's quite big deal for the food industry," he says. When making chips, for example, soaking cut potatoes in hot water for 10 minutes can reduce their acrylamide formation by almost 90% Wheat grain accumulates much more asparagine than necessary, and it seems to accumulate more when it doesn't get all the nutrients it needs, Halford says, particularly sulphur. Halford is trying to stop this processes genetically, using the gene editing technique Crispr. At the other end of the supply chain, many producers have been urged to reduce the acrylamide content of their products where possible, especially in baby food. This has been quite successful, says Schouten, who is pleased that the Dutch breakfast cake ontbijtkoek has around 20% of the acrylamide it used to have, by changing how it's produced. There are also ways to reduce acrylamide at home when cooking, says Saleh. She advises that, when making chips, for example, soaking cut potatoes in hot water for 10 minutes can reduce their acrylamide formation by almost 90%. The scientific interest toward acrylamide health risk has grown again in the recent years, says Laguzzi. It will be a long process, but within a few years, any link between acrylamide intake and cancer risk will hopefully be clearer, she says. In the meantime, that habit of scraping the burnt bits off your toast might not be such a bad idea. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230224-should-you-avoid-eating-burnt-food

By 1918, Charles M. Schwab was one of the richest men in the world. Schwab was the president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the largest shipbuilder and the second-largest steel producer in America at the time. The famous inventor Thomas Edison once referred to Schwab as the “master hustler.” He was constantly seeking an edge over the competition. One day in 1918, in his quest to increase the efficiency of his team and discover better ways to get things done, Schwab arranged a meeting with a highly-respected productivity consultant named Ivy Lee. Lee was a successful businessman in his own right and is widely remembered as a pioneer in the field of public relations. As the story goes, Schwab brought Lee into his office and said, “Show me a way to get more things done.” “Give me 15 minutes with each of your executives,” Lee replied. “How much will it cost me,” Schwab asked. “Nothing,” Lee said. “Unless it works. After three months, you can send me a check for whatever you feel it’s worth to you.” The Ivy Lee Method During his 15 minutes with each executive, Ivy Lee explained his simple daily routine for achieving peak productivity: At the end of each work day, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day. Repeat this process every working day. The strategy sounded simple, but Schwab and his executive team at Bethlehem Steel gave it a try. After three months, Schwab was so delighted with the progress his company had made that he called Lee into his office and wrote him a check for $25,000. A $25,000 check written in 1918 is the equivalent of a $400,000 check in 2015. The Ivy Lee Method of prioritizing your to-do list seems stupidly simple. How could something this simple be worth so much? What makes it so effective? Portrait of Ivy Ledbetter Lee from the early 1900s. (Photographer: Unknown) On Managing Priorities Well Ivy Lee’s productivity method utilizes many of the concepts I have written about previously. Here’s what makes it so effective: It’s simple enough to actually work. The primary critique of methods like this one is that they are too basic. They don’t account for all of the complexities and nuances of life. What happens if an emergency pops up? What about using the latest technology to our fullest advantage? In my experience, complexity is often a weakness because it makes it harder to get back on track. Yes, emergencies and unexpected distractions will arise. Ignore them as much as possible, deal with them when you must, and get back to your prioritized to-do list as soon as possible. Use simple rules to guide complex behavior. It forces you to make tough decisions. I don’t believe there is anything magical about Lee’s number of six important tasks per day. It could just as easily be five tasks per day. However, I do think there is something magical about imposing limits upon yourself. I find that the single best thing to do when you have too many ideas (or when you’re overwhelmed by everything you need to get done) is to prune your ideas and trim away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Constraints can make you better. Lee’s method is similar to Warren Buffett’s 25-5 Rule, which requires you to focus on just 5 critical tasks and ignore everything else. Basically, if you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything. It removes the friction of starting. The biggest hurdle to finishing most tasks is starting them. (Getting off the couch can be tough, but once you actually start running it is much easier to finish your workout.) Lee’s method forces you to decide on your first task the night before you go to work. This strategy has been incredibly useful for me: as a writer, I can waste three or four hours debating what I should write about on a given day. If I decide the night before, however, I can wake up and start writing immediately. It’s simple, but it works. In the beginning, getting started is just as important as succeeding at all. It requires you to single-task. Modern society loves multi-tasking. The myth of multi-tasking is that being busy is synonymous with being better. The exact opposite is true. Having fewer priorities leads to better work. Study world-class experts in nearly any field—athletes, artists, scientists, teachers, CEOs—and you’ll discover one characteristic runs through all of them: focus. The reason is simple. You can’t be great at one task if you’re constantly dividing your time ten different ways. Mastery requires focus and consistency. The bottom line? Do the most important thing first each day. It’s the only productivity trick you need. https://jamesclear.com/ivy-lee

Fat, Sugar, Salt … You’ve Been Thinking About Food All Wrong Scientists are asking tough questions about the health effects of ultra-processed diets. The answers are complicated—and surprising. In the late 2000s, Carlos Monteiro noticed something strange about the food that Brazilian people were eating. The nutritionist had been poring over three decades’ worth of data from surveys that asked grocery shoppers to note down every item they bought. In more recent surveys, Monteiro noticed, Brazilians were buying way less oil, sugar, and salt than they had in the past. Despite this, people were piling on the pounds. Between 1975 and 2009 the proportion of Brazilian adults who were overweight or obese more than doubled. This contradiction troubled Monteiro. If people were buying less fat and sugar, why were they getting bigger? The answer was right there in the data. Brazilians hadn’t really cut down on fat, salt, and sugar—they were just consuming these nutrients in an entirely new form. People were swapping traditional foods—rice, beans, and vegetables—for prepackaged bread, sweets, sausages, and other snacks. The share of biscuits and soft drinks in Brazilians’ shopping baskets had tripled and quintupled, respectively, since the first household survey in 1974. The change was noticeable everywhere. When Monteiro first qualified as a doctor in 1972, he’d worried that Brazilians weren’t getting enough to eat. By the late 2000s, his country was suffering with the exact opposite problem. At a glance, Monteiro’s findings seem obvious. If people eat too much unhealthy food, they put on more weight. But the nutritionist wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. He thought that something fundamental had shifted in our food system, and scientists needed a new way to talk about it. For more than a century, nutrition science has focused on nutrients: Eat less saturated fat, avoid excess sugar, get enough vitamin C, and so on. But Monteiro wanted a new way of categorizing food that emphasized how products were made, not just what was in them. It wasn’t just ingredients that made a food unhealthy, Monteiro thought. It was the whole system: how the food was processed, how quickly we ate it, and the way it was sold and marketed. “We are proposing a new theory to understand the relationship between diet and health,” Monteiro says. Monteiro created a new food classification system—called NOVA—that breaks things down into four categories. Least worrisome are minimally processed foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed meats. Then come processed culinary ingredients (oils, butter, and sugar), and after that processed foods (tinned vegetables, smoked meats, freshly baked bread, and simple cheeses)—substances to be used carefully as part of a healthy diet. And then there are ultra-processed foods. There are a bunch of reasons why a product might fall into the ultra-processed category. It might be made using “industrial processes” like extrusion, interesterification, carbonation, hydrogenation, molding, or prefrying. It could contain additives designed to make it hyper-palatable, or preservatives that help it stay stable at room temperature. Or it might contain high levels of fat, sugar, and salt in combinations that aren’t usually found in whole foods. What all the foods share, Monteiro says, is that they are designed to displace freshly prepared dishes and keep you coming back for more, and more, and more. “Every day from breakfast to dinner you are consuming something that was engineered to be overconsumed,” says Monteiro. The concept of ultra-processed food has caught on in a big way since it was first introduced in 2009: Brazil, France, Israel, Ecuador, and Peru have all made NOVA part of their dietary guidelines. Countless health and diet blogs extol the virtues of avoiding ultra-processed foods—shunning them is one thing that both followers of a carnivorous and a raw vegan diet can actually agree on. The label has been used to criticize plant-based meat companies, who in turn have embraced the label. Impossible calls its plant-based burger “unapologetically processed.” Others have pointed out that there’s no way we can feed billions of people without relying on processed food. The results of the study surprised Hall. On the ultra-processed diet, people ate around 500 extra calories per day and put on about two pounds. When people were on the whole-food diet, they ate fewer calories and lost weight—this is despite the fact that the meals on offer had roughly the same nutrient compositions. To Hall, this implied that there was something other than salt, sugar, and fat content that was causing people to eat excess calories and gain weight. “It suggested that there was something different about this NOVA categorization system,” he says. Maybe there is more to food than its constituent parts. Hall’s study drew a clear link between junk food and excess calorie consumption, but it can’t tell us why people on the ultra-processed diet ate more. After he published the results, Hall was flooded with suggestions from other scientists. Some thought it was because junk food is more calorie-dense. Since processed foods are often deep-fried and high in fat, they pack in more calories per gram than whole foods. Or maybe it was because junk food was eaten more quickly; in the study, people on the ultra-processed diet ate significantly faster than those eating whole foods. Other scientists thought that additives might be playing a role, or that junk food changed the gut microbiome in a way that influenced calorie intake. A big factor might be the effect that ultra-processed foods have on our brain. Alexandra DiFeliceantonio is an assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion who studies how junk food interacts with the brain’s reward systems. “We know a lot more about fat, sugars, and carbohydrates, and how those are signaled in the gut and to the brain. We know a lot less about the role of ultra-processing in altering any of those signals,” says DiFeliceantonio. Her hypothesis is that since ultra-processed foods are rich in easily available calories, they induce a potent reward response in our brains that keeps us coming back for more. DiFeliceantonio’s work draws parallels between junk food and the tobacco industry. In an editorial for the journal Addiction, DiFeliceantonio and her colleague Ashley Geardhardt argue that highly processed foods should be considered addictive substances if we measure them against the standards set for tobacco products. But until we really understand the science behind how ultra-processed food impacts our bodies, policy will always lag behind. “We saw big shifts in things like tobacco policy and policy for opioids when we had really solid, scientific, biological data,” says DiFeliceantonio. Taking on Big Food So what should health authorities do about it? Government guidelines in Brazil advise people to avoid ultra-processed foods altogether, while French guidelines recommend limiting consumption. But other countries’ guidelines don’t refer to ultra-processed foods at all. In 2021 an independent report commissioned by the UK government proposed a series of reforms aimed squarely at the ultra-processed food industry. The report recommended a tax on sugar and salt used in processed foods, and for large companies to report how much unhealthy food they were selling. The government’s response, published a year later, largely ignored these recommendations. In the UK’s official nutrition guidelines, the only reference to processed food is that people should eat no more than 70 grams of red or processed meat each day. While the role of processing in our diets has come under greater focus, public agencies have been slow to respond. Stanford nutritionist Christopher Gardner sits on the US Dietary Guidelines Committee and is a member of the American Heart Association. “For both of them, processed food is an issue they have to address next, because the public is so interested in this,” he says. “We don’t have a position yet. We need a position on this.” Hall, meanwhile, is running a new study to pinpoint what it is about ultra-processed foods that causes us to eat excess calories, and the first participants have already arrived at the clinical research center in Bethesda. The study is similar to his previous experiment, but this time he’ll be varying the ultra-processed diet he gives volunteers to test whether the energy density or palatability of the food influences how much people eat. If he can figure out what it is in ultra-processed foods that leads people to overeat, it might help design better policies to help people eat healthier diets, or lead food companies to reformulate their products. It might also mean that we narrow down our definition of ultra-processed food. Packaged and processed foods are such an important source of nutrition for so many people that we need to be careful before we demonize the entire category, says Hall. They’re convenient, tasty, and cheap. In Hall’s 2019 study, the weekly cost of the ultra-processed meals was $45 cheaper than the whole food diet. “If you design policies to try to eliminate those foods without at the same time providing cheap, inexpensive, easy, convenient alternatives, you’re going to have a lot of people who are going to experience negative consequences of that,” he says. Things get even trickier when you factor in the climate impact of our diets. Most plant-based meats are highly processed, but that doesn’t necessarily make them less healthy than their meat equivalents. Meat substitutes tend to be lower in calories and saturated fat and higher in fiber, but lower in protein. But on an environmental level, plant-based beef is much better than the real thing. “If you’re comparing a highly processed beef burger or pork sausage with its plant-based equivalent, then the plant burger or sausage is generally going to have lower environmental impacts,” says Tara Garnett, a food researcher at the University of Oxford. Monteiro admits that ultra-processed foods are sometimes better than their unprocessed alternatives, but he’s concerned that plant-based burgers might displace other, healthier plant-based foods. Even there the picture is complex. Christopher Gardner ran a trial where people swapped animal meat with plant-based meats for eight weeks. After the plant-based phase of the trial, people lost weight and had low cholesterol concentrations. When it comes to plant-based meats, Gardner says the ultra-processed label might be doing the category a disservice. Monteiro thinks that we can’t afford to wait until we know everything about ultra-processed foods before public health bodies take action. “We are dealing with something very complex. It will take many years to understand all of these mechanisms. But do we need to wait until we know all of this to start to do something to stop this?” he says. For now the science on ultra-processed foods is moving along slowly, but the debate is raging louder than ever. Updated 2-24-2022 11:30 GMT: Alexandra DiFeliceantonio’s academic affiliation was corrected. https://www.wired.com/story/ultra-processed-foods/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

No intro text today?

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-03/26/c_137067148.htm imagine if you make a plate of date roaches with one of them stuffed with an actual roach, chocolate roulette.