This ad for Subway sandwiches reminds you that, unlike their fast food competitors that sell burgers and fries and shakes, Subway is healthy. That seems obvious, since they’re selling sandwiches with lettuce on them while other places sell fattening burgers. But a new study suggests that in fact eating at Subway might be less healthy than eating at McDonald’s.

The study sent a bunch of kids off to the two chains. The researchers tracked what the kids ate and counted the calories. On average, whole meal at McDonald’s added up to 1,038 calories, but Subway wasn’t far behind at 955. And if you take away the extras and sides, Subway starts to lose out. The sandwich the study subjects ordered had 784 calories, while the burger only had 582. And the two meals were similar in other ways too. Here’s the NY Post:

Diners ordered 102g of carbohydrates at Subway compared to 128 at McDonald’s and 36g of sugar to McDonald’s’ 54g.

People ate even more sodium at Subway, with 2,149mg compared to 1,829mg at McDonald’s. Overconsumption of salt is a growing health crisis for Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned, putting children and adults at risk for hypertension, heart disease and obesity. One CDC study found the average kid consumers 3,300mg of salt daily, far more than the recommended 2,300mg.

Now, the sides, extras and drinks do seem to differ between Subway and McDonald’s. At Subway, participants purchased 61 calories worth of sugary drinks, while at McDonald’s they bought 151 calories. Subway usually serves chips as a side, while McDonald’s offers fries. And the teens were asked to buy a “meal,” which usually means more than a sandwich or burger.

Of course, Subway wasn’t totally happy with the study. It responded to the work saying:

“[We] want to clarify a few things. As long time leaders in offering customers healthier options, Subway restaurants has always provided customers nutritional information on all of our menu offerings along with a wide array of great-tasting, low-fat and low-calorie subs and salads.”

And the study authors aren’t really out to get Subway in particular. They want everyone to stop eating at these restaurants in general. Their conclusions state:

We found that, despite being marketed as “healthy,” adolescents purchasing a meal at Subway order just as many calories as at McDonald’s. Although Subway meals had more vegetables, meals from both restaurants are likely to contribute to overeating.

Stay in and make your own sandwich or burger, the authors say, and you’ll be far better off.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Fancy Fast Food
Welcome to Beefspace, Where the Battle for Fast Food Dominance Rages On

Photo: Danielle Scott

This weekend, fans will gather for the 138th annual Kentucky Derby, North America’s favorite horse racing event. Fans will place bets for the likes of Black Onyx, Oxbow and Frac Daddy and cheer on the horses and their jockeys as they gallop around the track. But watching the races and enjoying the spring weather aren’t the Derby’s only draws. Traditional also calls for bountiful cups of icy mint juleps sipped alongside a hearty bowl of burgoo, a Kentucky favorite often served at the event.

In the mid-19th century, Kentucky’s Henry Clay was no stranger to the delights of the mint julep. The University of Kentucky provides a favorite recipe, straight out of Clay’s diary—the words of a true disciple of the drink:

The mint leaves, fresh and tender, should be pressed against a coin-silver goblet with the back of a silver spoon. Only bruise the leaves gently and then remove them from the goblet. Half fill with cracked ice. Mellow bourbon, aged in oaken barrels, is poured from the jigger and allowed to slide slowly through the cracked ice.

In another receptacle, granulated sugar is slowly mixed into chilled limestone water to make a silvery mixture as smooth as some rare Egyptian oil, then poured on top of the ice. While beads of moisture gather on the burnished exterior of the silver goblet, garnish the brim of the goblet with the choicest sprigs of mint.

As for burgoo, it’s a spicy stew made of beef, chicken, pork and veggies. Back in Clay’s days, however, burgoo could include a bit of whatever animal happened to be around, including venison, raccoon, squirrel, opossum or wild birds. That’s probably how it earned the appetizing nickname of “roadkill soup.”

While wild animals are probably lacking in most pots of burgoo today, each restaurant’s offerings do provide a unique culinary experience since no two places use the exact same blend of spices and ingredients. If you’d like to try and concoct your very own spin on burgoo, Epicurious has a recipe for Kentucky bourbon burgoo, or take your pick from the many other versions on offer.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Kentucky Derby’s Forgotten Jockeys
Kentucky – Cultural Destination 

Image: Ross Hong Kong

You shouldn’t eat right before bed, or before swimming, or before a lot of medical procedures. But should we add eating standing up to that list? It’s unclear, science says.

Some claim that eating while standing will eating will lead to weight gain. USA Today writes:

Studies show that people who skip sit-down meals in the interest of saving time may be costing themselves unwanted calories. Canadian researchers asked one group of people to eat food out of plastic containers while standing over a kitchen counter, while a second group ate an identical meal off of a plate sitting down at a table.

At their next meal a few hours later, the “standers” downed about 30 percent more calories than the “sitters.” The researchers theorized that eating on your feet doesn’t register psychologically as a “real meal”, and as a result people may subconsciously grant themselves permission to eat more later in the day.

But, regardless of this vein of chiding, many of us still eat while standing up. And BBC Future says that it’s probably, actually, just fine for you. Those who sit down to eat spend 34 percent longer on their meals than those who stand, so standing meals could make your scarf rather than savor. But science suggests that the it doesn’t really matter how fast you eat. Here’s BBC Future:

There are very few studies comparing fast and slow eaters, partly because it wouldn’t be easy to randomise people into eating at a particular speed and then to enforce that at every meal. A study from 1994 did include questions about eating speed in a survey of dietary habits. They found the speed at which you believed you ate had no relationship with the frequency of indigestion.  Research conducted in 2010 found the same, but these two studies rely on our ability both to judge our eating speed accurately, and to report it honestly.

This problem was overcome in a South Korean study, which timed how long a group of cadets training at the Armed Forces Nursing Academy actually took to finish their meals. With their regimented life where they all woke, ate and exercised at the same time, they were the ideal group of people to study. The one difference in their daily routines was the speed at which they chose to eat. But yet again, if you examine the study in detail, speed of eating seemed to have little effect on indigestion.

Even speed eaters, who eat quicker than anyone else (albeit usually sitting down), don’t seem to get more indigestion than those who eat at a more humanlike pace. All this seems to suggest that the idea that eating standing up might be bad for you is, at the very best, unsupported by the scientific evidence. So stand tall, hungry lunchers.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Lessons in School Lunch
What’s in Your Lunch Box?

Image: Richard Herrmann

California authorities are trying to crack down on smugglers shipping fish bladders across the border. That’s right, fish bladders are a thing that people smuggle.

In fact, they’re worth a ton of money. One bladder from the Totoaba macdonaldi fish can garner $5,000 in the United States and over $10,000 in Asia. The bladders are mainly used in Chinese food, like soups. Often the fish are simply stripped of their bladders and left on the beach, meat and all, since the traders don’t care about the meat, and being caught with it would be a liability.

Now, we’re not talking about the same kind of bladder that a human has. The prized organ on the totoaba isn’t full of urine. It’s the fish’s swim bladder, an organ that fills with gas to change the buoyancy of the fish, allowing it to ascend and descend in the water.

From the outside, the Totoaba macdonaldi isn’t a particularly striking fish. They’re big, weighing up to 220 pounds and getting up to 6.5 feet long. The species is endangered throughout its range, which spans the California coast, says NOAA, mostly because of fishing for this prized bladder. And the Chinese species of the same fish was eaten to extinction, which is why suppliers are turning to the U.S. population.

Scientific American reports that trade in U.S. totoaba bladders is heating up:

In the latest case that led to criminal charges, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer inspecting a car at the Calexico-Mexicali port of entry, about 130 miles east of San Diego, found 27 totoaba bladders hidden under floor mats in the back seat of a car, U.S. prosecutors said in a statement.

The Washington Post chronicles several other cases:

Jason Xie, 49, of Sacramento was accused of taking delivery of 169 bladders on March 30 in a hotel parking lot in Calexico, about 120 miles east of San Diego. Xie told investigators he was paid $1,500 to $1,800 for each of 100 bladders in February.

Anthony Sanchez Bueno, 34, of Imperial was charged with the same crime after authorities said he drove the 169 bladders across the downtown Calexico border crossing in three coolers. He told investigators he was to be paid $700.

Song Zhen, 73, was accused of storing 214 dried totoaba bladders in his Calexico home.

“These were rooms that didn’t have furnishings,” U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said. “In every room, fish bladders were dried out over cardboard and papers.”

The bladders found in Zhen’s house could be worth over $3.6 million on the black market.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Two Americans Charged in Narwhal-Tusk Smuggling Ring Bust
Smuggler Caught With 10 Percent of an Entire Species

Image: Sharon Drummond

There are all sorts of food challenge ideas that are probably bad for you. There’s the gallon challenge, in which you try to drink a gallon of whole milk in an hour. Or the saltines challenge, which asks you to eat six saltines in sixty seconds without drinking anything. But some of these challenges are more dangerous than others. In fact, pediatricians are now officially opposed to you trying the cinnamon challenge, in which you swallow a tablespoon of cinnamon without water. Here’s what that looks like:

And, as it turns out, trying to eat that much cinnamon can be really bad for you. Reuters reports:

“What we were discovering was that it wasn’t just that this was a dare prompted by peer pressure, but in fact there were acute health issues associated with it and there might be some real concerns for more chronic health issues,” said Dr. Steven Lipshultz, a co-author on the study from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

The shorter term health issues include choking, lung inflammation and asthma attacks. And since cinnamon powder is almost entirely made of cellulose, a chemical that doesn’t break down easily, it can stick around in your lungs and cause serious damage. In fact, the cinnamon challenge sends some people to the hospital. Reuters reports that in 2012, U.S. poison control centers were called 222 times “relating to abuse or misuse of cinnamon by teens” and about thirty of those teens required medical attention.

A study on the phenomenon, titled “Ingesting and Aspirating Dry Cinnamon by Children and Adolescents: The “Cinnamon Challenge”” points to a YouTube search that found 51,000 clips showing the challenge. The authors say that there hasn’t been much in the way of research on cinnamon exposure to human lungs, but in studies with rats they found serious damage to the lungs. They write:

Although we cannot make a strong statement on documented pulmonary sequelae in humans, it is prudent to warn that the Cinnamon Challenge has a high likelihood to be damaging to the lungs. These discussions can also help learn to weigh the risks and rewards of yielding to peer pressure when considering senseless and risky behaviors.

The moral of the pediatricians story here: parents, tell your kids not to eat spoonfuls of cinnamon. And kids, knock it off, you could seriously damage your lungs.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Cinnamon as Health Food
Too Much Chili Powder Or Black Pepper Can Kill Kids

Image: Yvonne Liu

If there are things in this world we can all agree are bad, hangnails, world hunger and oil spills might be a few of them. But invasive species are up there, too. Now consider the lionfish—the beautiful, poisonous and ravenous fish that is making its invasive way across the Atlantic ocean like a slow-crawling, devastating oil spill.

The comparison is apt in a few ways, says NPR:

They reproduce every few days and eat anything that fits into their mouths. And nothing eats them because they’re covered with venomous spines.

Since it was first sighted in 1985, the lionfish has expanded its turf from Florida, all the way up to New York City and down to Venezuela, some 10,000 miles away from its native habitat in the South Pacific Ocean.

There are tons of myths about how the lionfish “spill” started. Some say that Hurricane Andrew destroyed a collector’s tanks, releasing the spiny demons into the ocean. Others claim that they were released maliciously. More likely, they came in ballast water on ships, or escaped from an aquarium shipment. But in reality, nobody knows.

Researchers who study lionfish genetics say that the current invaders are all very similar, genetically, which indicate that the current population came from just a few rogue individuals. One study puts the number at about eight original females. Others say it only requires three. Smithsonian reported on the invasion in 2009:

But soon those lionfish began to breed a dynasty. They laid hundreds of gelatinous eggs that released microscopic lionfish larvae. The larvae drifted on the current. They grew into adults, capable of reproducing every 55 days and during all seasons of the year. The fish, unknown in the Americas 30 years ago, settled on reefs, wrecks and ledges. And that’s when scientists, divers and fishermen began to notice.

Everywhere the lionfish arrives, it begins to slowly nibble away at the local flora and fauna. And since nothing eats it, it creeps along, much like an oil spill, until some sort of external force comes in to clean up. For oil spills, we have all sorts of ways to scoop and sponge and remove the offending sticky substance. But for lionfish, there’s really just one option: kill them. Kill them in large numbers, preferably. To encourage people to do so, several places have come up with recipes for cooking and eating the colorful, poisonous critters.

“The flesh is actually very light and delicate,” REEF’s Lad Adkins told NPR. “It’s not strong flavored. So you can season it many different ways. It’s a great eating fish.”

So, like oil spills, lionfish are creep into an area, kill everything and stick around until we humans decide to do something about it. The only difference is you can’t make tasty tacos out of oil spills.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Invasion of the Lionfish
The Colorful Lionfish Under the Sea

Photo: ChrisM70

You might be surprised at the number of people willing to pay a large sum of cash to drink elephant poop. Well, not poop, exactly, but coffee beans that have passed through an elephant’s digestive tract and have been expelled from the other end. USA Today explains the peculiar situation:

In the lush hills of northern Thailand, a herd of 20 elephants is excreting some of the world’s most expensive coffee.

Trumpeted as earthy in flavor and smooth on the palate, the exotic new brew is made from beans eaten by Thai elephants and plucked a day later from their dung. A gut reaction inside the elephant creates what its founder calls the coffee’s unique taste.

Stomach turning or oddly alluring, this is not just one of the world’s most unusual specialty coffees. At $500 per pound, it’s also among the world’s priciest.

So, how is it? ”Very interesting,” tells one brave taste-tester to USA Today. “Very novel.”

Elephants are not the only animals whose excrement people can pay to have the privilege to sip on. Civets – a type of nocturnal small carnivore – are also used to such purposes in Southeast Asia, especially in Vietnam. The Economist describes:

Three years ago Mr Hung and three partners started Legend Revived, a high-end brand in Ho Chi Minh City that sells chon beans in Vietnam, Britain and Norway at $500 per kilogram (“The finest gift from Vietnam”).

Today most chon merchants don’t look in the wild for manure, but rent out farms for their cats to roam, chew (often less than a fifth of the ripest beans) and then let nature take its course. After farmers collect and wash the droppings, they dry them in the sun for weeks until the outer skin falls off. Brewers then use one of several methods for roasting the beans. One popular approach involves dashing the beans with sugar, salt and butter, and then giving them a medium or light roast over some coffee-tree wood (a heavy roast would cause the sugary beans to lose their natural taste).

But the story doesn’t end with elephants and civets helping coffee connoisseurs get their caffeine fix. From elephant poo coffee now comes elephant poo beer. The beer is made from those same coffee beans, which have been fermented into the alcohol. In Japan, apparently, the elephant poo brew is becoming a big thing, where it goes by the name ‘Un, Kono Kuro.’ The Drinks Business reports: 

The Sankt Gallen brewery called the beer a “chocolate stout”, despite it not containing any chocolate.

Mr Sato, from Japanese website RocketNews24.com, tasted the beer and said: “After taking my first sip there was an initial bitterness that got washed over by a wave of sweetness. Following that, a mellow body rolled in and spread out through my mouth.

“Usually people talk about aftertaste when drinking beer but with Un, Kono Kuro the word afterglow is much more appropriate.

“After downing the last drop, slowly rising from my throat and mouth was that afterglow. The combination of bitter and sweet stayed fresh and lingered in my head. It was a familiar aroma that accompanied me through the entire beer.”

The bottles quickly sold out on the brewery’s website, but the company promises that the elephant beer will soon be served on tap at their Tokyo location.

And not to be outdone, the civets also offer their own version of digested coffee bean beer. From Eating Goodly:

Last week, my friend, Charles, gave me a really cool Danish beer for my birthday: Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Brunch (Weasel).  It’s an Imperial Oatmeal Stout “brewed with one of the world’s most expensive coffees, made from droppings of weasel-like civet cats.”

It was without a doubt one of the wildest beer’s I’ve ever had.  It poured like liquid lead, eliciting an “Oh my god.” from my roommate.  The mouthfeel matched the appearance – thick, thick, thick.  It felt like cool mocha syrup.  Flavors were just as dense – mostly rich coffee with dark chocolate, butterscotch, and a good amount of clean (and much needed) bitter acidity on the back and sides of the tongue.   This beer was huge in body, flavor, and concept.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever crave a beer like this, but going along for the ride was awesome.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Most Exclusive Coffee in the World Is Harvested from Elephant Poo 
Beer for Dessert 

Photo: reed_sandridge

If you’ve enjoyed a bowl of pho or a banh mi sandwich lately, or just wanted to kick up your taco, pizza or fries a notch, you’ve likely reached for the fiery red bottle with the rooster on it. Sriracha hot sauce, an ubiquitous staple of Vietnamese joints across the States, did not in fact originate in Vietnam. Rather, it is the delicious vision of a southern Vietnamese refugee named David Tran who introduced his culinary baby in the 1980s. The Los Angeles Times tells Tran’s story.

When North Vietnam’s communists took power in South Vietnam, Tran, a major in the South Vietnamese army, fled with his family to the U.S. After settling in Los Angeles, Tran couldn’t find a job — or a hot sauce to his liking.

So he made his own by hand in a bucket, bottled it and drove it to customers in a van. He named his company Huy Fong Foods after the Taiwanese freighter that carried him out of Vietnam.

After founding the company in LA’s Chinatown, he introduced his now famous creation soon after.

His Sriracha, a version of a hot sauce originating in Si Racha, Thailand, quickly spread through the San Gabriel Valley and eventually the nation.

Last year alone, Huy Fong Foods sold $60 million of the stuff. Revenue has been steadily growing at a rate of about 20 percent per year, and in June the company is moving out of its original location and to a new $40 million space. Tran told the LA Times that his American dream was never to become a billionaire; he just liked spicy, fresh chili sauce.

He’s turned down multiple lucrative offers to sell his company, fearing his vision would be compromised.

He intends to keep it a family business: His son is the president, and his daughter is vice president.

He has repeatedly rejected pleas to sell stock in the company and turned down financiers who offer him money to increase production significantly.

“If our product is still welcomed by the customer, then we will keep growing,” Tran said.

Rooster sauce seems welcome indeed. The Sriracha Rooster Sauce Facebook page has 285,000 likes, and fans gather there to share their favorite spicy creations and additions, leaving messages like:

My 10 year old takes this in his lunchbox everyday and puts it on ….. Everything!

Put this on egg noodles & chicken tonight and it was awesome!

I pratically drink this.. Lol

♥ ur my 1 and only spicy sauce

Photo: Stevemaher

From a report put out by the Food and Drug Administration in February, a scary note from the front lines of the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Looking at meat in the supermarket, the FDA found that around half of all ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef harbored antibiotic resistant bacteria says the New York Times. Almost all of the meat had Enterococcus bacteria, a family of microbes that has a high rate of antibiotic resistance and can cause urinary tract infections and other health problems. Chicken samples had antibiotic resistant salmonella and antibiotic resistant campylobacter, which cause food poisoning replete with diarrhea and fever.

High rates of bacteria on your meat isn’t really the issue, though. Everyone knows (or should know) to make sure their meat is cooked throughout, and to keep raw meat away from things that won’t be cooked.

The bigger problem, says the Times, is the rise seen in antibiotic resistant bacteria compared to previous years.

Of all the salmonella found on raw chicken pieces sampled in 2011, 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant, while less than 50 percent of the salmonella found on chicken tested in 2002 was of a superbug variety.

According to a big investigative story put together by health reporter Maryn McKenna and colleagues, the rise of antibiotic resistant e. coli carried by chickens could be behind the prevalence of urinary tract infections in American women, with one in nine women being affected each year.

The federal government’s report, says the Times, was largely ignored until a follow-up report was put out by the environmental lobby organization Environmental Working Group, and Applegate, a company that sells “organic and natural meats.”

“Public health officials in the United States and in Europe,” says the Times, warn that the over-use is antibiotics in agriculture is helping to drive the rise in resistance.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Blame Your Chicken Dinner for That Persistant Urinary Tract Infection

Photo: StreetFly JZ

In March, soda fiends across New York City breathed a sigh of relief when a judge invalidated Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on selling soft drinks larger than 16 ounces at restaurants, movie theaters or food carts. But new research from the journal PLoS One shows that, even if Bloomberg’s ban had gone into effect, people not only would have found ways to consume large amounts of soda, they actually may have drunk up even more of the sugary stuff.

People seem to buy larger amounts of soda when purchasing packs of smaller drinks, the study found. At the University of California, San Diego, researchers offered volunteers three menus containing different drink options: 16-, 24- or 32-ounce individual drinks; a 16-ounce drink or bundles of two 12-ounce or 16-ounce drinks; or only individual 16-ounce drinks.

People tended to buy more total soda when the 12- or 16-ounce drink bundles were on offer, the researchers found. For restaurants, this offered an additional monetary perk since hypothetical profits were highest when menus contained these small serving pack options. In other words, if drink serving sizes ever do become limited, both restaurants and customers can get what they want by offering and ordering multiple smaller beverages rather than one super-sized helping.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Could Diet Soda Cause Clinical Depression? 
Is the Can Worse Than the Soda? 

Photo: Gary Stevens

Hangover cures vary from place to place. Locals in Tokyo swear by a hearty bowl of ramen, Londoners prefer a full English breakfast and New Yorkers swear by guzzling coconut water. But New Orleans, a city known for its predilection for overindulgence, offers a delectable solution that may actually work. According to researchers at the American Chemical Society’s annual conference, NOLA’s traditional Yak-a-mein soup—a beefy, soy saucy broth loaded with noodles, beef, chicken, hard-boiled eggs, shrimp and onions—holds all the right ingredients for purging the body of the consequences of a night spent partying in the Quarter.

The soup, which also goes by the name “Old Sober,” contains salts, proteins and other ingredients scientists know improve conditions during a hangover. The hangover’s dreaded pain comes from dehydration, paired with the effects of an ethanol-saturated blood stream. Substances called congeners, found in dark liquors such as scotch, cause toxic side effects and acetaldehyde, another substances created when the body breaks alcohol down, also wreaks havoc.

Yak-a-mein’s boiled eggs, however, contain a compound called cysteine, which helps to expedite acetyldehyde’s removal from the body. The salty broth helps to replace sodium, potassium and other salts lost thanks to alcohol’s diuretic effect. While fatty beef doesn’t necessarily help with the hangover itself, it does help slow down the absorption of alcohol—a useful precaution for those who choose to pair the soup with hair-of-the-dog hangover remedies.

If Yak-a-mein doesn’t sound like a particularly southern word, your intuition is correct. According to Big Easy folklore, soldiers stationed in Korea in the 1950s struck upon the hangover goldmine and brought the recipe back with them when the returned home, where it became something of a local staple.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Korea’s Black Day: When Sad, Single People Get Together and Only Eat Black Food 
Did New Orleans Invent the Cocktail? 

Image: Mr. T in DC

The human body is capable of registering five tastes—salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami. And that last, funny-sounding one, is far more important than you might think. It might even, some food researchers suggest, help correct our crash-course into obesity.

Umami wasn’t even discovered until 1908, by a chemist who went on to patent the famously tasty-yet-dangerous MSG. (“Umami” comes from the Japanese word for “yummy.”)  But understanding umami explains a lot of our weird food loves, writes Amy Fleming at the Guardian:

Umami is why the Romans loved liquamen, the fermented anchovy sauce that they sloshed as liberally as we do ketchup today. It is key to the bone-warming joy of gravy made from good stock, meat juices and caramelized meat and veg. It is why Marmite is my mate.

It’s not totally clear why we love umami so much. We like sweet things because they’re full of calories. We like salty things because our bodies need salt. Sour and bitter tastes signal danger. But umami seems more complicated. We tend to like it more in cooked or aged foods. It seems to have something to do with the glutamate in a food, but while glutamate often signals protein, it doesn’t always. No one really knows what makes umami so great.

But we do know that we love it. And those who think a lot about how to get people to eat right, have considered using umami to stew people away from obesity-inducing foods and towards healthier ones. Here’s the Guardian again:

Lacing cheap, fattening, non-nutritious foods with MSG to make them irresistible is clearly not responsible, but some argue that glutamate can be used responsibly to good effect. Breslin says one of his key motivations is finding ways through taste research to feed malnourished people. “What you want,” he says “are things that are very tasty that kids will eat, that will go down easy and will help them.” Meanwhile, Professor Margot Gosney, who chairs the Academic and Research Committee of the British Geriatrics Society is “looking into increasing the umami content in hospital food,” to make it more appealing to older people, without overdoing the salt.

Some studies suggest that umami makes us feel fuller, faster. Others say it doesn’t matter at all. And some scientists wonder if umami exists in the first place. Some people argue that it’s a cultural taste. Many Westerners cannot identify it in taste tests, while the Japanese can. Some say that the umami trend was a ploy to fight MSG backlash. So perhaps we should figure out whether it’s even real before we try to fix our diets with it.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Yummy: The Neuromechanics of Umami
Fish Sauce, Ketchup and the Rewilding of Our Food

Photo: Lynn Kelley Author

Nearly one in five children aged 6 through 19 are now considered obese, says the CDC, with the rate soaring over the past 30 years. The CDC pegs obesity as a simple issue of “caloric imbalance”—you’re taking in more energy through food and drink than your body is using. People generally want to fight childhood obesity with a few Top Ten Tips and handy slogans: eat less, play more, get off the couch and eat your leafy greens.

According to a run-down on the state of the science of childhood obesity written by Tara Haelle for Scientific American, however, the issue is not nearly so simple. Drawing on a range of recent studies, Haelle says that some of the standard worries: too many video games, not enough exercise and too much loafing around are actually less important than you’d think. “Obesity is not a disease of inactivity,” she writes.

Instead, the drivers of obesity revolve around simple themes: too much food and too much unhealthy food. These food-related issues are further mediated, she says, by environmental issues that make it harder to eat healthily. For instance, kids using adult-sized plates will take more food than they would if they had a more kid-friendly dish. Vending machines filled with sweets and soda don’t help, either.

We are raising our children in a world that is vastly different than it was 40 or 50 years ago,” says Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity doctor and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa. “Childhood obesity is a disease of the environment. It’s a natural consequence of normal kids with normal genes being raised in unhealthy, abnormal environments.

The environmental factors in these studies range from the seemingly minor, such as kids’ plate sizes, to bigger challenges, such as school schedules that may keep teens from getting sufficient sleep. But they are part of an even longer list: the ubiquity of fast food, changes in technology, fewer home-cooked meals, more food advertising, an explosion of low-cost processed foods and increasing sugary drink serving sizes as well as easy access to unhealthy snacks in vending machines, at sports games and in nearly every setting children inhabit—these are just a handful of environmental factors research has linked to increasing obesity, and researchers are starting to pick apart which among them play bigger or lesser roles in making kids supersized.

On top of overeating of the wrong kinds of foods, the second major driver of teenage obesity, says Haelle, is that teens aren’t getting enough sleep: “Increasing sleep from 7.5 to 10 hours a day among 18-year-olds could shave four percentage points off the proportion of teens with a BMI over 25, the researchers predicted.”

The broad-ranging rise in childhood obesity rates, owing to environmental factors and the way our society is set up, means that the fixes won’t be so simple as taking the controller away and kicking the kids outside.

[K]ids’ 21st-century environment—not their self-control or reduced physical activity—is the key culprit in the rise in obesity. “People like to make obesity a disease of blame, but the last 40 years has not seen an epidemic of our children losing willpower,” Freedhoff says. “There are dozens and dozens of these environmental factors. Unless we reengineer our children’s environments, we are not likely to see any changes in children’s weights.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Methane on the Breath Is an Indication of Obesity
Taking Childhood Obesity to Task

Image: Natalie Barletta

For many people, graham crackers are simply a vehicle for delivering marshmallows and chocolate. But the original vision for graham crackers had little to do with s’mores. The crackers were marketed and designed as a diet food to help people cut down on their sexual urges.

Like many highly religious people, Sylvester Graham (yes, the cracker is named after him) thought the world had a problem with immorality. In the mid-1800s, the Presbyterian minister set out to find something to help those suffering from the sins of sexuality, in particular. He also happened to be quite interested in diets. A vegetarian himself, he believed that eating foods without spice or sugar, without processed flour and without chemicals was the way to avoid thoughts of sex. To help people follow that diet, he created crackers. Graham crackers.

Today, graham crackers do have both sugar and spices in them. But Graham’s original crackers were pretty awful to eat. The unrefined flour made them a tiny bit sweet and a tiny bit nutty. But mostly they were bland.

Courtney Allison at Today I Found Out writes about how the crackers evolved into our sweet treats:

Since the days of the Graham Diet, the cracker recipe has evolved significantly. For instance, Nabisco began making Graham crackers with bleached white flour and oils. The germ is rarely used as excluding the germ in the flour mixture results in the crackers having a longer shelf life. Today, grocery stores carry Graham crackers of all flavors: sweetened with honey, cinnamon sugar, and more. You can even snack on chocolate flavored crackers.  Beyond that, common ways to eat these crackers include smothering them with peanut butter, crushing them up for cheese cake and pie crusts, as well as cloaking them in frosting and decorating them in gumdrops to replicate winter cottages.  That’s not to mention that they are traditionally used as the outer layer of a tasty little marshmallow and chocolate sandwich by campfires the world over. If there is indeed a hole in the floor of heaven, and Sylvester Graham is looking down, he is surely not happy about any of this.

As far as we know, Graham’s crackers have not yet cured anyone of sexual urges. Graham’s invention also went on to influence several other foods like breakfast flakes and Rice Krispies. None of those have cured sexual impulses either.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Stale Cookies in a Jar
When Did the Girl Scouts Start Selling Cookies?

Image: Penn State News

April 1st marks the beginning of Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month. But how does one honor this event? For starters, by watching out for, reporting and killing invasive pests like these:

1. The pest: The horrifying giant African snail

These slimy villains have wreaked havoc from Florida to Australia. They’re the size of a baseball, lay 1,200 eggs each year, can survive at almost any temperature, carry meningitis and eat 500 different kinds of crops and the sides of houses. Right now, Australia is panicking over having discovered just one of these giant snails. The USDA wrote in 2012, after squelching an invasion:

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time we’ve faced this damaging invasive pest. Back in 1966, a boy smuggled three giant African snails into South Florida upon returning from a trip to Hawaii. His grandmother eventually released the snails into her garden. Those initial three snails grew into one giant family—after completing a 10 year, $1 million eradication campaign, we had collected and destroyed more than 18,000 snails!

How to celebrate Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month with the giant African snail: Call an expert.

Aside from being a huge problem for crops and houses, the snails slime isn’t really safe to handle. And remember, they can carry meningitis. Let someone else handle your snail problem.

2. The pest: the Asian longhorned beetle

These beetles are quite beautiful, with shiny black bodies and little blue spots along their antennae and bodies. But don’t be fooled. The Asian longhorned beetle invasion has felled tens of thousands of trees in the Northeastern United States. The USDA writes:

The ALB has the potential to cause more damage than Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight and gypsy moths combined, destroying millions of acres of America’s treasured hardwoods, including national forests and backyard trees.

How to celebrate Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month with the Asian longhorned beetle: Report it.

Your region might be quarantined, like some are right now in New York and other states, but there’s no cure for the beetle infection, so the only thing to do is to stop its spread.

3. The pest: the grapevine moth

These moths threaten something quite important—wine. They feed on the flowers of plants and can leave behind fungal diseases that rot the fruits. Understandably, winemakers of the United States are not pleased, and Napa Valley has its own dedicated grapevine moth initiative.

How to celebrate Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month with the grapevine moth: Spray pesticides to kill it.

Farmers can apply the recommended doses of pesticides to keep the moth at bay. Here’s the Napa Valley program:

If applications are timed properly, conventional growers would only need to make one application for each of the two generations.  For organic growers, a total of four to five applications for the two generations will be necessary due to shorter residual of the organic insecticides.  Growers are advised to alternate between products to minimize risk of insecticide resistance.  Timing for the first application should be just prior to the beginning of bloom.

The list of invasive species goes on and on and—from your orange juice, to your maple syrup to your landscape, do apples and pears, to baseball bats—affects most parts of your day.

More from Smithsonian.com:

This Giant Snail Is Giving Australia Terrible Flashbacks to the Last Giant Snail Takeover
Are Humans an Invasive Species?
Invasion of the Longhorn Beetles