Citrus fruits may deserve a more prominent role in the diet. A research team in Canada has just shown that drinking several glasses of orange juice daily can pump up blood concentrations of the so-called good cholesterol.Boosting this high-density-lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol can slow the buildup of artery-clogging plaque (SN: 9/9/89, p. 171).In their study, Elzbieta M. Kurowska and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, monitored changes in cholesterol concentration and related blood chemicals in 16 men and 9 women for 23 weeks. The middle-age volunteers were...

Cooking will kill almost any microbe. But when it comes to serving raw foods, such as the vegetables in a garden salad, neutralizing germs with heat is not an option and washing the greens doesn't reliably disinfect. Although raw produce can be sanitized in a bath of dilute bleach, a team of Georgia scientists is developing an alternative--acidic electrolyzed water--that appears to kill microbes even more effectively and could be just as cheap and easy."The technology is not new," explains Yen-Con Hung of the University of Georgia in Griffin. It relies on an electric current between two electr...

Teens are always looking for creative excuses for late homework, low test scores, and waning attention in class. Any who stumbled onto a copy of the September American Journal of Clinical Nutrition may have uncovered the basis for a particularly novel rationalization: "My parents made me a vegetarian."Plants do not make vitamin B-12, also known as cobalamin. Diets that eschew all animal products can therefore lead to B-12 deficiencies. Because the vitamin plays a key role in some brain functions, toddlers raised from weaning on strictly plant-based foods can experience delays in the acquisitio...