From salad dressings and sauces to the oil for your fried favorites, a better-than-ever soybean is making a big splash thanks to gene editing.

It’s an evolution of plant breeding that shows tremendous promise in helping farmers preserve our planet and improve our food.

Through gene editing, we now have a high-oleic, heart healthy oil made from soybeans – the first commercially available gene-edited food product. With zero trans fats, this odorless, colorless, neutral-flavored oil also has a longer shelf life and performs well under high heat conditions like baking and frying making it ideal for cooks in kitchens around the world.

Farmers have begun growing high-protein gene-edited soybeans, too, helping to meet the growing demand for plant-based foods and improving feed for animals and fish.

Growing soybeans in a more sustainable way – growing enough food using less land and water has farmers across the U.S. excited about gene editing.

Whether it’s growing healthy, abundant crops, caring for the environment or enhancing our favorite foods gene-edited soybeans are making waves and it’s just the beginning of great things to come.

The post Gene Editing and Soy For Healthier Food and a Healthier Planet appeared first on Best Food Facts.

The relationship between food waste and processed foods, as well as the connectedness of biotechnology with food affordability and accessibility, were just two of the thought-provoking topics during the 2020 Best Food Facts TASTE Tour.

This year’s tour went virtual, with the influencers involved in one of three video conferences. The discussions were:

• Sustainable Food with conversations about food waste, processed foods, biotechnology and food affordability
• Sustainable Egg Farming, providing dialogue on hen housing and impacts on animal well-being, food affordability and natural resources
• Sustainable Crop Farming with a focus on crop practices and environmental stewardship

The tour was part of Optimizing Sustainability. Learn more about the project.

“Our main concern with our food supply right now is the amount of waste that we have. We are wasting so much of our food,” Dr. MacDonald said during the conversation on sustainable food. Processing is one of the most effective ways to make our food system more resilient, she said.

“That’s not sustainable when you think about a third of the food that we produce is just going out into the trash. We have to balance this idea that processing is a negative. It really isn’t. If you process foods, they stay fresher longer. You don’t have to throw them away after a couple of days,” Dr. McDonald said.

Julie Tran Deiley, who blogs at The Little Kitchen, said the tour changed her perception about processed food.

“I feel like she’s right. It is essential to sustainability because if we only used fresh foods, we have more food waste,” Deiley said. “So that really opened my eyes and it made me think, well okay it’s fine that I use the processed foods in my cooking and my everyday life.”

Dr. MacDonald also talked with the influencers about chemicals used in food and the impact they have on making food more sustainable.

“We have used the FDA as our governing body for assessing what ingredients can go into food and which ones and how much they can be used in what kinds of food systems,” she said.

Sometimes people pick out a specific ingredient on a food label and avoid it because it is a chemical.

“But everything in food is a chemical. Something like tocopherol or arachidonic acid might sound like a really horrible thing, but both of those are essential nutrients,” Dr. MacDonald said. “So you can’t just automatically assume that because it has a chemically sounding name it’s somehow bad for me. Those ingredients all have a function in there and they’re used in a way that has been tested and shown to be safe.”

The insights struck a chord with Rachael Yerkes of Eazy Peazy Mealz.

“One of the things that she mentioned is that everything in food is a chemical, so when we look at a package of processed food and we see chemicals, we sometimes get like leery of that food. But that’s not something to be afraid of, because everything in the food already is a chemical,” she said.

Other experts who were part of the discussion were Jennie Schmidt, a registered dietitian and farmer from Maryland, and Amanda Moder, a registered dietitian with Hy-Vee.

The Cookie Rookie Becky Hardin said what she learned on the TASTE tour gave her confidence with her food choice.

“The FDA does approve all of those ingredients that are on shelf-stable foods so I can trust those. I don’t have to go through with a fine-tooth comb every single item that I buy. If I trust the brand and I trust the ingredients that I’m seeing, that’s a great thing and I can feed our family longer. We can feel good about doing that,” she said.

The tour was part of Optimizing Sustainability, an initiative of The Center for Food Integrity that supports understand and prioritize factors to decisions that are most sustainable. In addition to the tour, Best Food Facts examined sustainability impacts and the topics of grass-fed and grain-fed beef, pesticides and GMOs. Learn more about the project and read all of the influencers articles.

The post A Conversation On Sustainable Food appeared first on Best Food Facts.

The post What is CRISPR? 3 Part Video Series appeared first on Best Food Facts.

A new discovery is creating a lot of interest gene editing. CRISPR is a technology that allows scientists to make precise changes in genetic code. To find out more about this scientific discovery and its potential uses, Best Food Facts asked blogger Lynne Feifer of 365 Days of Baking to bring her passion for food into the research lab and explore CRISPR technology.

Lynne interviewed Dr. Rodolphe Barrangou in his laboratory at North Carolina State University. “I tend to think of myself as a CRISPR expert and CRISPR enthusiast, as well as a food scientist,” he said.

Lynne asked Dr. Barrangue to explain what CRISPR is.

“CRISPR is actually an acronym, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It’s a very cumbersome name arguably, but at the same time a very catchy and easy to remember acronym,” he said.

Dr. Barrangou explained that this gene-editing technology works much like a text editor that changes a letter in a word.

“CRISPR in many ways is a molecular scalpel that enables scientists to cut DNA. You can very precisely, very selectively, very efficiently cut DNA. That’s what geneticists do. They find a particular sentence that is unique in the book of life in the DNA code of any particular cell, look for the mistake and then replace this mistake and edit it out with this corrected version,” he explained.

There are many ways that it can be used.

“It’s a question of when, not if, CRISPR-based technologies solve the biggest challenge of medicine, things like curing HIV, curing Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, curing cancer, curing people who are sick,” Dr. Barrangou said.

Lynne looked further into the potential for CRISPR as it relates to treating disease and making food healthier. Check out the other videos in the series: How Can CRISPR Treat Disease? and How Can CRISPR Improve Food?

The post What is CRISPR Technology? Part 1 appeared first on Best Food Facts.

CRISPR is a precise gene-editing tool that has potential to treat diseases in humans and animals. Blogger Lynne Feifer of 365 Days of Baking helped Best Food Facts find out more about this technology and how it can be used.

“This is such a powerful, potent promising technology. We have so much at stake here in food and ag for animals and plants, agriculture, biotechnology, biofuels, medicine, the clinic translational medicine to cure disease and feed the world,” said Dr. Rodolphe Barrangou, whom Lynne interviewed at his lab at North Carolina State University.

One possible application for CRISPR is in treating sickle cell, an inherited disease. The disease affects 100,000 people in the United States and is most common among African-Americans. Dr. Nazia Tabassum is a pediatric specialist who treats sickle cell patients.

“Some of the patients come in for severe complications like severe pain crisis which requires IV narcotics and hydration. Some of these kids can also have severe sickling in their lungs which we call acute chest syndrome, which is a medical emergency,” she said.

Lynne had planned to interview Shakir Cannon, who had battled sickle cell disease his entire life and was a passionate advocate for CRISPR technology. However, he passed away in December 2017.

CRISPR also has potential to ease suffering and cure diseases among animals. Lynne talked to Erin Brenneman, a pig farmer in Iowa who said they are interested in how CRISPR might cure a disease called PRRS. “The acronym PRRS stands for porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome. It is the most economically and emotionally draining disease for all those raising pigs in North America, Europe and Asia,” Brenneman said.

She said pig farmers are excited about the potential for PRRS to cure the disease.

Check out the other videos in the series What is CRISPR? and How Can CRISPR Improve Food?

The post How Can CRISPR Treat Disease? Part 2 appeared first on Best Food Facts.

Blogger Lynne Feifer of 365 Days of Baking has been learning about CRISPR gene-editing technology and its potential. Lynne is usually in her kitchen stirring up new recipes, so she was very interested to learn how CRISPR might be applied to make foods better. She started her journey with Dr. Rodolphe Barrangou who explained how this gene-editing tool works in Part 1. Part 2 looked at how CRISPR could treat disease.

“As a food blogger, I get a lot of my followers coming to me asking for diabetic recipes, gluten-free recipes, allergenic recipes. How does CRISPR fit into that?” Lynne asked.

“Enter CRISPR to the rescue,” Dr. Barrangou said. “If you are allergic or if you don’t like this particular compound in this particular trait, we can inactivate it. We can make gluten-free wheat. We can make hypoallergenic nuts. If we know what the gene is, we can take it out or turn it off or turn it down.”

That’s exactly what Dr. Jessica Lyons and her team are researching at the University of California Berkeley. Their research is focused on using CRISPR technology to remove a deadly compound in the cassava plant, which is also known as yucca.

“Cassava is a really important staple crop for about 800 million people in tropical and subtropical regions of the world,” Dr. Lyons said. She noted that stunting in children under age 5 caused by malnourishment is prevalent in the regions where cassava is widely consumed. However, the plant contains compounds that can cause people to be poisoned from cyanide if the root has not been sufficiently processed.

“If people are relying on cassava and they’re ingesting the cyanide over time, they can get these neurological disorders. The best known one is called konzo and it causes paralysis of the lower extremities,” Dr. Lyons said. “For people who eat plenty of protein in their diet, the cyanide is not as much of a threat. But for people who don’t have much to eat besides cassava, then the cyanide poisoning is more of a threat.”

In the lab, she is working to remove the compounds that cause poisoning.

“We’re going to use CRISPR as a tool to knock out some genes that are very important for the pathway that result in these cyanogenic glucosides. We expect that by knocking these genes out, we’ll remove the cyanogenic glucosides from the root and so the cassava will not release the cyanide any more,” Dr. Lyons said.

Lynne observed that Dr. Lyons is very passionate about the project and asked why. “I’ve been the recipient of a great deal of privilege in my life and I’m aware of that. I think that my work on projects like this are a great opportunity to use the knowledge and the resources and skills that I have to have a positive impact on the world,” she said.

Lynne said her experiences learning about CRISPR had been enlightening.

“After my series of conversations with researchers, it is clear to me CRISPR technology has the potential to make a positive impact on the world in human medicine, disease prevention and food improvements –- and that’s only a few of the possibilities,” she said.

The other videos in the series are What is CRISPR Technology? and How Can CRISPR Treat Disease?

The post How Can CRISPR Improve Food? Part 3 appeared first on Best Food Facts.

Miracle Berry Tablets, aka mberry, allow you to take a flavor-tripping journey. This flavor-tripping journey begins by placing the tablet in your mouth and allowing it to dissolve on your tongue for 10 to 15 minutes. After it has fully dissolved, the receptors on your taste buds have been affected, allowing anything sweet, sour, savory or bitter to have a bit of a different taste.

How does it work?

According to the mberry website, “Miracle berries (Synsepalum dulcificum) contain miraculin that changes the way your taste buds taste foods.”  HowStuffWorks breaks it down a little bit more: “under the influence of miraculin, however, the sweet receptors start signaling and suppress the sour tastes. The miraculin rewires the sweet receptors to temporarily identify acids as sugars.”

Wanting a first-hand experience, we, the interns (aka: guinea pigs), at Best Food Facts volunteered to see just how altered our taste buds would be.

So, what all did we try?

• Sour Patch Kids
• Pineapple
• Hot Cheetos with Lime
• Pickles
• Salt and Vinegar Pringles
• Whipped Cream Cheese
• Nutella
• Jalapeno
• Strawberry
• Lemon
• Coffee
• Tequila

Wow – we were all blown away when the tablets actually worked. Lemons tasted like homemade lemonade, strawberries tasted like they had been rolled in sugar and the cream cheese might as well have been cheesecake. We were pleasantly surprised with the lack of heat from the jalapeno, and disappointed that the tequila tasted horrible. (Don’t worry, we’re over 21!).

Would we do this again? Absolutely. Did some of us already purchase the tablets to make our friends and family try? You bet. It was the best hour and a half of our lives.

Want to see our reactions for yourself? Watch the video:

The post Flavor Tripping: A Food Journey Without Leaving Home appeared first on Best Food Facts.

To test out our experiment, we ran to the local grocery store and picked up limes and lemons. We tested our fruit three different ways – whole, peeled and sliced. Each time, we noticed that the lemons floated to the top of the bowl while the limes stayed relatively close to the middle/bottom of the bowl. When we peeled and sliced the fruit, the separation just continued to grow.

What we found strangest, however, was that when we peeled the fruit the limes only continued to sink deeper in the bowl while the lemons began to sink a little bit further into the bowl, but remained close to the top. The phenomenon continued when the fruit separated further after they were sliced. We assumed this happened because the fruit was sliced, therefore making the individual pieces lighter.

Based on our observations, we wanted to know the science behind why this was happening. Why, based on our observations, were the larger fruits floating to the top while the smaller fruits were sinking to the bottom? Does it have something to do with the acidity of the fruit? The weight of the peel? Or just the overall mass? We asked Sarah Downs, RD, for an explanation.

So, why do lemons float and limes sink?

Sarah Downs, RD: “The reason limes sink and lemons float is due to density, or the mass per unit of volume. An object will float if it is less dense than the liquid it is placed in and will sink if it is denser than the liquid it is placed in. Lemons and limes both have densities that are very close to water, so you would expect that they would both float. However, limes are slightly denser than lemons, which is why they sink and lemons float.”

Intrigued? Check it out for yourself in the video below:

The post Why Do Lemons Float and Limes Sink? appeared first on Best Food Facts.

OSF sent us a few of the Golden Delicious variety of Arctic Apple for us to try. To find out if there was a difference in taste between the genetically modified apple and a traditional apple you can currently find at the grocery store, we put them to the test with our Best Food Facts team. Here’s what they said:

Neither this video nor the taste test was sponsored by OSF. The opinions shared are those of the taste testers.

_{The image “In one movement….” by storebukkebruse is licensed under CC BY 2.0.}

The post How Now Brown…Apple? appeared first on Best Food Facts.

“Good food safety is really important because of one in six of us, as Americans, will get foodborne illness some time this year and it starts with bringing that food home,” Haugen said.

Start with your grocery bags. If you use reuseable bags, wash them because studies show that bacteria can live grocery bags. Once you have your food home and properly stored, there are four key things to keep your food safe.

“The first one is washing your hands. So even bringing that food home and putting it in the refrigerator, your hands are already contaminated. And any time I handle meats, I always use paper towels instead of a cloth towel because you can always transfer bacteria if you’re just using a towel,” Haugen said.

“The second tip that I have would be to keep things separate. And that would be especially when you’re preparing your meat and your poultry. You want to have a separate cutting board for raw meat and you want to have a separate cutting board for cooked meats. It’s also really important to make sure you get good cutting in boards that are dishwasher safe and not using wood cutting boards,” she said.

The next step is to use a meat thermometer and make sure food is cooked to the proper temperature. “You can eliminate all bacteria in your raw meat by getting things to the right temperature,” she said.

For whole cuts of pork and beef, such as steaks or roasts, cook to 145 degrees. Ground beef should be cooked 160 degrees and poultry, such as chicken and turkey, need to be cooked to 165 degrees.

“Last but not least is storage. As soon as possible after your meal, put it in a container and you want to make sure that you can label it too so you know “when did I put this in here.” And I like to have them clear just because you can see them what’s inside otherwise you tend to forget,” Haugen said.

Proper food handling can help make sure your food is safe and keep you and your family healthy. Remember these tips”

• Wash reusable shopping bags
• Wash hands thoroughly
• Separate raw and cooked meats
• Use a meat thermometer to make sure foods are cooked to the proper temperature
• Promptly refrigerate leftovers

Check out out video series on antibiotic resistance:

What Causes Antibiotic Resistance? Part 1

Antibiotic Resistance and Use in Food Animals. Part 2

Antibiotic Resistance and Navigating Food Labels. Part 3

The post Antibiotic Resistance and Proper Kitchen Techniques. Part 4 appeared first on Best Food Facts.