Why be on Twitter for Food & Nutrition Professionals

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I wrote a blog post for the American Society for Nutrition on how Twitter can be useful to food and nutrition professionals. Because of space constraints, I had to cut down and even remove a few thoughtful quotes that I received from many health and nutrition scientists and professionals when I asked them what they liked about it. So below are the full quotes of the 9 responses I received. Also, if you are just getting started and don’t know who to follow, you might want to have a look through Read more [...]

Artificial Opinions

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Note: A shorter version of this post appears on Weighty Matters. An opinion article in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism by Dr. Susan Swithers about artificial sweeteners made for scary articles last week. Here is a small sampling: "Do Diet Drinks Mess Up Metabolisms?" at NPR's The Salt "Diet soda may do more harm than good" at CNN (in which the journalist says Stevia isn't a chemical and Swithers is quoted saying saccharin is a derivative of tar- in fact it was discovered Read more [...]

What’s Bleach Doing in My Fruit?

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This article was originally published on Food Product Design. Last month, I came across a blog post at Prevention magazine titled “What’s Anti-Freeze Doing in Fast Food?” [edit: original link is broken- now here as of July], based on a blog post titled “6 Cosmetic Chemicals in Fast Food.” The intent is to frighten people away from fast food by pointing out some scary sounding chemicals used in food production and preservation, like propylene glycol and sodium stearoyl lactylate that happen Read more [...]

Dr. Oz’s not-so-sweet artificial sweetener recommendations

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Dr. Oz writes today that artificial sweeteners are "linked to diabetes and some forms of cancers – including cancers of the colon, kidney, and esophagus." The study he links is by Gallus and colleagues (2006), who actually found that artificial sweeteners were NOT linked to any of those cancers. There was a positive association for total artificial sweetener consumption only with laryngeal cancer, but an inverse with breast and ovarian cancer. So do artificial sweeteners prevent cancer too? Read more [...]

Lazy Scholar Chrome Extension

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I got tired of highlight title-> ctrl+c -> open Google Scholar -> ctrl+p -> search every time I want to check if Google Scholar has indexed the full text of a scientific abstract that interests me. So I wrote a Chrome Extension to save some clicks. You can get it at the Chrome Web Store. Note: it does a lot more than what is listed below now. To see all features, click through to the Chrome Web Store. It does this so far: Click the icon while browsing an abstract (on pubmed Read more [...]

Experimental Biology tweets #EB2013

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As I've done for another conference, I collected tweets for this year's Experimental Biology conference with a Python script that I wrote and played around with them in R. I could not attend but it was great to follow along through twitter. Check out David Despain's roundup post for nutrition coverage. Here is the spreadsheet of 5,455 tweets starting on 4/18 at 4:21PM EST through 4/28 at 6:34PM EST: link. This is obviously more days than the conference, but if anyone wants to do any analysis you Read more [...]

Naturopathic distraction

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This morning I saw a press release that said "Treatment by naturopathic doctors shows reduction in cardiovascular risk factors" based on a Canadian study. The skeptical bells went off in my head as I read it: this sure seems like a study designed to legitimize naturopathy by focusing on non-controversial practices. To add, 10 of 14 of the authors are from the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. The full text is freely available here. As a short summary of the study, Canada Post employees Read more [...]

When gadgets go beyond the data: HAPIfork

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A vibrating fork called the "HAPIfork" got a lot of buzz (sorry) last week with promises to help you lose weight, enhance digestion, and improve overall feeling by letting you know when you are eating too fast and thus slowing you down. I was surprised at these claims, given that I have read some of the research on eating speed and weight and found it mixed, and overall unconvincing. My post on that is here. The research spans back to the 1960s, but curiously, the company only cites research Read more [...]

2012: A year of nutrition according to twitter

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In the past I've done a favorites list at the end of each year, but I've been enjoying using Python to download tweets, so I decided to try something new. I downloaded the last year's worth of tweets from people who in my opinion consistently link to good sources and combined them all to see what links were most popular. I used a number of people from the list that I maintain here. Obviously my focus was nutrition, but the people I chose represent a broad survey of food, nutrition, biotech, and other Read more [...]

An analysis of Prop37 (GMO) twitter activism

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The election this November had an important topic on California ballots: Proposition 37, which would require the labeling of foods containing genetically modified ingredients. It ended up failing by just under 3% margin. While I didn't support the initiative (though I don't live in California), it was fascinating to observe both sides of the campaigns and activists on Twitter leading up to and after the election. This was an opportune time to get a glimpse at GMO activism, so I collected tweets Read more [...]