This Mother’s Day, many moms will find their brood and mates proffering glittering booty: sparkling necklaces, earrings, bracelets, brooches, and rings fashioned in whole or in part of gold. There may also be gilded plates, glasses, and grandma’s favorite—fragile, matched sets of hand-painted tea cups and saucers.As women admire these tokens of their loved ones’ admiration, few will give passing thought to where the precious metal in their gifts came from. New research indicates that in some regions of the world, the mining of gold produces an unrecognized toxic fallout: fish dinners laced wit...

This Mother’s Day, many moms will find their brood and mates proffering glittering booty: sparkling necklaces, earrings, bracelets, brooches, and rings fashioned in whole or in part of gold. There may also be gilded plates, glasses, and grandma’s favorite—fragile, matched sets of hand-painted tea cups and saucers.As women admire these tokens of their loved ones’ admiration, few will give passing thought to where the precious metal in their gifts came from. New research indicates that in some regions of the world, the mining of gold produces an unrecognized toxic fallout: fish dinners laced wit...

Here’s a healthy tip for home vintners: Save the bathtub for cleaning your body—not for storing crushed grapes.A 66-year-old Australian man paid a high price for his habit of periodically tapping a pair of bathtubs for winemaking: periodic bouts of intense abdominal pain, constipation, and mood swings for more than 2 years.The incident came to light when the home vintner started canvassing the medical profession for respite from the pain. Despite a host of costly endoscopies, colonoscopies, ultrasound scans, and computed tomography scans, the source of this man’s discomfort eluded local health...

Make no mistake: Chocolate is not a health food. Indeed, most portions are loaded with empty calories from sugar and saturated fats.Several studies in recent years, however, have demonstrated that among sweets, chocolate may possess a few nutritional advantages over most calorie-rich alternatives. The latest of these good-news findings is a report that milk chocolate contains tiny amounts of conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA—a relatively low-profile fat that has been winning some big kudos.Most trans fats—ones containing a structural feature that make them solid at room temperature—have a bad r...

Asian women tend to have much lower breast-cancer rates than their Western counterparts--unless they move to Europe or North America. Then the cancer’s incidence in these women begins to match local norms.This observation has suggested that something about the Western way of life, probably diet, promotes cancer--or that something about Eastern diets inhibits the development of breast malignancies. Strong support for the latter comes from a recent study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.The study showed tha...

Twelve years ago, scientists uncovered a mechanism to explain why the folk remedy of eating cranberries fights urinary tract infections. It now appears that the medicinal powers of the pucker-inducing berries might extend to breast cancer as well.For years, Najla Guthrie and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario in London have been exploring anticancer prospects of flavonoids, natural antioxidants, isolated from citrus juices (SN: 5/4/96, p. 287). Because deeply pigmented berries also contain dozens of such compounds--several with suspected anticancer activity--Guthrie recently t...

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...