FoodBozo.com

SHANGHAI — U.S. fast-food giant McDonald’s Corp. plans to nearly double its presence in the world’s fastest developing economy over the next few years, senior officials from the company said Tuesday after they launched the first McDonald’s Hamburger University in China.

McDonald’s outlined its ambitious China plans at a time when relations between foreign businesses and Beijing are souring, with a growing number of Western companies complaining of a deteriorating operating environment in the country.

Read more: McDonald’s to Double Restaurants in China

Salt Works, one of the world’s top salt companies, specializes in a variety of exotic sea salts, gourmet salt slats, bath & spa salts in a variety of grades and sizes. With most orders shipped for free and on the same day, plus a huge inventory upwards of 2 million pounds of salts, you don’t need to look any further than Salt Works for your next order.

Whether you’re looking for gourmet salt or salt for bath & spa, you need to consider ordering some of the best & most interesting salts on the market; Himalayan salts.

Himalayan salt is pure, hand-mined salt found naturally; deep within the pristine Himalayan Mountains.

Crystallized more than 200 million years ago, ancient sea beds were covered by volcanic lava, protecting the salt from modern-day pollution, and lending to the belief that Himalayan Pink salt is the purest salt to be found on earth.

This stuff is the real deal, with incredible quality and versatility for your daily uses and exotic desires.

One of the unique products are the Himalayan Salt Slabs. These things look beautiful. They’ve been hand-cut straight from ancient salt deposits deep from within the Himalayan Mountains. Possible uses for these include;

• Serving platter- giving a salty flavour to foods including sushi, fruits, and vegetables
• Cooking aid- sear vegetables after coating with butter, offering even heat distribution

If you relish drinking coffee, you may be brewing up a healthy dose of prevention from type 2 diabetes.

Dutch and American researchers reviewing a variety of studies found that participants who habitually drank coffee had a lower risk for developing type 2 diabetes. The team based their results on nine studies involving more than 190,000 people and 8,394 cases of type 2 diabetes in Europe and the United States.

The researchers determined that people who consumed more than six or seven cups of coffee a day had a 35% lower risk of the disease than those who downed less than two cups a day. Moreover, people who drank between four and six cups had a 28% lower risk as compared to those who drank less than two cups daily.

Read more: Study: Coffee linked to lowered diabetes risk

Looking for ways to save on groceries? There are plenty of tips in a new book written by a pair of California schoolteachers who detail their month-long experiment to live on just a dollar a day. For 30 days, Kerri Leonard and her boyfriend Christopher Greenslate lived on oatmeal porridge for six cents a serving and lunches of homemade bread filled with five cents’ worth of peanut butter, and a favourite dinner dish, chana masala, a kind of chickpea curry that came in at 25 cents a serving.

In their book, On a Dollar a Day: One Couple’s Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America, Leonard writes that “car payments, mortgage payments, and credit card payments” drove them to attempt the project. Her proposed solutions to economizing, she writes, “ran along the lines of more reasonable grocery lists and better planning. That was when Christopher volunteered the information that a portion of the world eats on a dollar a day or less. ‘Why don’t we try it?’ he asked.”

Read more: Feeding yourself on a dollar a day

OTTAWA (CBC) – Quebec maple syrup producers are promoting the health benefits of the sticky treat.

One U.S. researcher has found 13 new antioxidant compounds in maple syrup, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers says.

University of Rhode Island researcher Navindra Seeram, backed by $115,000 from the federation, the Conseil pour le développement de l’agriculture du Québec and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, presented his findings recently at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Read more: Maple syrup’s health benefits touted

Also see N.B. maple syrup producers tap new funds

PARIS (AFP) – The same molecular pathways that steer people into drug addiction also lie behind the craving to overeat, driving individuals into obesity, a new study suggests.

The research, based on lab animals, bolsters long-standing suspicions that addiction to pleasure stems from overstimulus of a key reward mechanism in the brain, its authors say.

Publishing online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida fed rats high-fat, high-calorie treats — bacon, sausage, cheesecake and so on — and watched the rodents bulk out dramatically.

Read more: Junkies and junk-food addicts share craving mechanism

LONDON – The Easter Bunny might lower your chances of having a heart problem. According to a new study, small doses of chocolate every day could decrease your risk of having a heart attack or stroke by nearly 40 per cent.

German researchers followed nearly 20,000 people over eight years, sending them several questionnaires about their diet and exercise habits.

They found people who had an average of six grams of chocolate per day – or about one square of a chocolate bar – had a 39 per cent lower risk of either a heart attack or stroke. The study is scheduled to be published Wednesday in the European Heart Journal.

Read more: Study: A small dose of chocolate could cut heart attack or stroke risk by almost 40 per cent

Also see BBC’s Chocolate ‘can cut blood pressure and help heart’

Someone named P. Marchio filed this patent for a “banana extractor and ice cream injector” in 1932. What a wonderful idea! Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this was ever actually made, nor is there any sign that a banana with ice cream in it will ever replace the classic banana split.

More: Banana-Ice Cream Injector Patent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A mutation in a single gene can turn hybrid tomato plants into super producers capable of generating more and much sweeter fruit without genetic engineering, scientists said in a study released on Sunday.

The study also showed that using classic plant-breeding techniques can boost yield as dramatically as using genetically modified organisms, said researcher Zachary Lippman of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Read more: Single gene powers hybrid tomato plants: study

(Reuters) – An international team of scientists has managed to transfer disease resistance from one plant family to another, offering broader protection from potentially costly and destructive pests.

A team led by Cyril Zipfel at Britain’s Sainsbury Laboratory found that transferring a single gene from a wild plant to disease-susceptible crop plants made them more robust against infections like bacterial wilt and other diseases.

If the results can be duplicated more widely, they could help prevent massive crop losses and avoid environmental, health and financial costs associated with using pesticides, the researchers wrote in the Nature Biotechnology journal on Sunday.

Read more: Scientists find new way to help crops fight pests