TipHemp

19/11/2021

Why do french fries taste so bad when they're cold?
Grainy, flavorless, rigid, yet soggy — is there anything worse than an old, cold french fry?

But how does a warm, golden, crispy and all-around perfect french fry go from a delicious food that you can't stop eating to a food that you can't get away from fast enough?

One of the main reasons that french fries lose their appeal when cold is that their texture changes, said Matt Hartings, an assistant professor of chemistry at American University in Washington, D.C.
That change in texture can be explained by the chemistry of potatoes, Hartings told Live Science. Potatoes are filled with starch, Hartings said. Starches taste good when they are "hydrated," he said.

Think of the starches in potatoes as tiny crystal spheres, Hartings said. At really high temperatures (like in fryers), water will go into those spheres and fill them up like balloons, he said. Instead of a small, hard sphere, you end up with something more "poofy," he said.

And this "poofy" texture is something people really like, Hartings said.

But as fries cool down, the water starts to move out of the crystals, and you lose the fluffy texture, Hartings said. The spheres become more crystalline and gritty, he said.

And where does the water go when it leaves the starchy spheres? Right into the crust of the fry, Hartings said. That turns the crispy crust that came out of the fryer into a soggy mess.
Temperature also partially explains why the taste of fries changes as they cool down, Hartings said. Simply put, heat can heighten the flavors in foods, he said. Consider how different your morning coffee tastes when it gets cold, he added.

Finally, smell plays a big role in how a food tastes, Hartings said. Fresh french fries have a great aroma, but when they're cold, the smell is largely gone, he said. Without that smell, a lot of the flavor disappears, he said.

19/11/2021

Wolfing Down Meals May Lead to Weight Gain and Heart Woes
If your mother ever warned you to slow down because you eat too fast, she now has at least one good reason to support her case: Wolfing down food can expand your waistline and take a toll on your heart, a new study from Japan suggests.

Researchers found that people in Japan who were fast eaters were more likely to become obese than those who ate at a slower pace, according to the findings, which were presented today (Nov. 13) at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions meeting in Anaheim, California. [9 New Ways to Keep Your Heart Healthy]

Fast eaters were also more likely to develop a condition known as metabolic syndrome, — a group of symptoms that increase a person's risk for heart disease and diabetes — compared with people who ate slowly, the study found. A person is considered to have metabolic syndrome when he or she has three of the following five risk factors: abdominal obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, high triglycerides and low HDL, or "good," cholesterol.
This is not the first time that researchers have identified health risks associated with eating too quickly: Previous studies have shown that a faster eating speed can contribute to the development of obesity, said lead author Dr. Takayuki Yamaji, a cardiologist at Hiroshima University in Japan. But little was known about the relationship between eating speed and the risk of developing metabolic syndrome, he said.
In the new study, the researchers looked at about 1,100 people in Japan with an average age of 51. All of the participants had a physical exam after enrolling in the study and answered questions about their diet, lifestyle habits and medical history.

At the beginning of the study, none of the men or women had metabolic syndrome, but five years later, 84 people had developed the condition.

19/11/2021

How long can a person survive without water?
Imagine that the taps switched off tomorrow, the rivers and streams ran dry, and the oceans turned into dry valleys. How would you react? And more importantly, how long would you survive?

There's no reliable predictor of how fast dehydration would kill a person. Many survival blogs suggest that an average person can survive for somewhere from two days to a week without liquids, but that's a rough estimate at best. A person's health, the weather and the individual's physical activity levels all help determine how long a person will last without water. Older people, children, individuals with chronic diseases, and people who work or exercise outside are at particular risk of dehydration, according to the Mayo Clinic.

In a very hot environment, "an adult can lose between 1 and 1.5 liters [2.1 to 3.2 pints] of sweat an hour, Randall Packer, a biologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., wrote for Scientific American. "A child left in a hot car or an athlete exercising hard in hot weather can dehydrate, overheat and die in a period of a few hours."
Usually, when a person is dehydrated enough to get sick, they're also suffering from overheating, meaning that the body's internal temperature is too high.

But this isn't always the case, especially among certain groups of people, said Dr. Kurt Dickson, an emergency-medicine doctor at Banner Thunderbird Medical Center in Arizona. Very young children and elderly people with dementia might not remember to drink water, or be able to get themselves water without help, he said.

So how much water does a person need to lose before severe dehydration sets in? According to 2009 National Health Service guidelines in the United Kingdom, severe dehydration sets in when a person loses about 10 percent of their total weight to water loss — though that measurement is too difficult to use in practice.

But at up to 1.5 liters of water loss per hour on a hot day, that kind of dehydration can happen a lot faster than conventional wisdom suggests.

Once a person's water levels dip below a healthy amount, characteristic symptoms set in: thirst, dry skin, fatigue, light-headedness, dizziness, confusion, dry mouth, and speedy pulse and breathing, according to the University of Rochester Medical Center. Dehydrated children cry without spilling tears. Their eyes, cheeks and tummies become sunken; they grow listless, and their skin doesn't flatten when pinched and released.

Patients come in to the emergency room, "and they're fatigued, tired, sometimes dizzy — more when they stand up — [and] sometimes vomiting," Dickson told Live Science. "If [the dehydration] is really bad, they can be in shock, where they're cold and clammy, not responsive. It can also be that they just don't feel well, a generalized malaise."

Dickson noted that other conditions can also cause these symptoms, so it's not always clear that dehydration is the culprit. "You've got to rule other things out," he said. "But if the guy's a roofer and it's July in Phoenix, you can cut a lot of things out."

As water levels drop inside the body, the liquid gets diverted to fill vital organs with blood, causing cells throughout the body to shrink, Dr. Jeffrey Berns, then the president-elect of the National Kidney Foundation, told The Washington Post in 2014. As water leaches out of brain cells, Berns explained, the brain contracts and blood vessels within the cranium can burst.

19/11/2021

19/11/2021