Life Line

A low-dose radiation lengthens the shelf-life of the foods and reduces insect infestation and other related afflictions. But serendipitously, they also discovered that gamma rays knock out flatulence-causing carbohydrates called oligosaccharides from the legumes. Humans lack the enzyme that can dissolve oligosaccharides and so the bacteria in the large intestine feasts on the carbohydrate, in the process creating an obnoxious mix of hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane, which often know their way out.

The scientists studied moong, bengal gram, horse beans, horse gram and cow peas and concluded that bombarding of beans which have been soaked for two days with low-dose gamma rays significantly eliminated the guilty components in popular Indian foods. Their work has been reported in the prestigious magazine New Scientist and published in the journal Food Chemistry. BARC has invited private food packaging firms to use their facility and label food in a manner that will assure some unfortunate Indians about the safety of these legumes. Machaiah hopes that soon labelling of foods will become popular in India through which consumers can judge the food by its cover and decide what’s good for them.

Pednekar says that "legumes are rich in nutrients and it’s sad that some people should be denied them just because of the fear of flatulence." Legumes may not be as popular in the West, but they have found ways of reducing flatulence in foods popular with them. Now the BARC scientists have given something that interests us all. "Our colleagues didn’t exactly chuckle when we were at it," they say, adding that among serious scientists flatulence is a problem and not a joke. "They were very very supportive of our cause." Truly, the wind beneath their wings.

Food For Thought

Next time you buy a shampoo for your little girl, check the product info to ensure it doesn’t contain hormones. In a report in the New Scientist, a US-based Indian scientist has alleged some hair products containing hormones could be triggering early puberty in girls. Chandra Tiwary, former chief of paediatric endocrinology at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, claims that black girls in the US are attaining puberty earlier than their white counterparts because they use hormone-laced shampoos, most of which are sold as treatments for dry, brittle hair. The labels usually state they contain placenta, hormones or "estrogen". The report says while such products are no longer sold in Europe, many are still available worldwide over the Internet. However, it adds, the evidence that oestrogen-laced hair products cause early puberty remains limited.

The Good News

Glasses developed by British defence scientists to reduce fighter pilots’ workload by enabling their eyes to direct weapons could aid in diagnosing dyslexia, reports the Nature. The British government has just given a grant to make child-size prototype glasses.Dyslexia, the inability of some kids to read or write properly, affects 5-10 per cent of the world population. It often goes undiagnosed and as a result children suffer the humiliation of being perceived as stupid. Scientists think that eye movements offer clues as to why dyslexics struggle to read and write. Until now, dyslexia researchers lacked a means of measuring eye movements accurately. The glasses, says the report, should help scientists "establish whether a subject’s eyes are looking at the same thing or if they are simply not coordinated. " The technology could potentially be used in primary schools for diagnosis, for catching the disorder early is important for children’s education and self-esteem.

The Bad News

Don’t gorge on those burgers and footlongs. You might get shortsighted. A report in the journal New Scientist suggests that growing consumption of highly-refined starches such as bread and cereals may explain rising short-sightedness in Europe. This was borne out by studies on Inuit and of Pacific populations, where one group on Western diet has a high rate of myopia, while the other, which relies on a protein-rich fish diet, does not. Scientists at University of Sydney argue that refined starches are digested more rapidly, prompting pancreas to make high levels of insulin to break down the resulting sugars. But high levels of insulin are also known to lead to a drop in levels of a protein crucial in the growth process and to which the eye is particularly sensitive.