News 2019

What better accompaniment to festive feasting and your impending food coma than a roundup of tasty stories from 2019? Sit back as Imperial serves up some festive food for thought, featuring unusual stuffing, strange pudding, dried cricket snacks, and food sensors. After all, 'tis the season to be jolly and enjoy all the treats Christmas has to offer! Grub's up In the 1800s, lobsters were considered the food of slaves and prisoners; a poor person's food.

More than one in three lowand middle-income countries are facing high levels of obesity and under-nourishment, according to a report involving UCL researchers. The report, published today in The Lancet,  says a new approach is needed to help reduce the 'double burden' of undernutrition and obesity at the same time, as the issues become increasingly connected due to rapid changes in countries' food systems.

Labelling food and drink with the amount and type of exercise needed to burn off its calorie content may be a more effective way of encouraging people to make 'healthier' dietary choices, shows research carried out in collaboration with the University of Birmingham.

Researchers at Oxford University, together with and international colleagues, have discovered jet stream patterns that could affect up to a quarter of global food production. In a new study published today , scientists show how specific wave patterns in the jet stream strongly increase the chance of co-occurring heatwaves in major food producing regions of Northern America, Western Europe and Asia.

Over 30 million Chinese children, aged between seven and 18, are overweight or obese - placing them at greater risk of an early death and this number is set to rise to 50 million by 2030, caused in part by the role grandparents play in childcare. Researchers at the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol worked with Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, enlisting 1,641 six-year-old children across 40 primary schools in Guangzhou to evaluate the effectiveness of the CHIRPY DRAGON programme in tackling childhood obesity.

Educating parents and grandparents - as well as improving physical activity and the food provided at school - could hold the key to solving China's obesity pandemic, according to one of the largest trials of childhood obesity prevention in the world. Over 30 million Chinese children, aged between seven and 18, are overweight or obese - placing them at greater risk of an early death and this number is set to rise to 50 million by 2030, caused in part by the role grandparents play in childcare.

People eat more with friends and family than when dining alone - a possible throwback to our early ancestors' approach to survival, according to a new study. Previous studies found that those eating with others ate up to 48 per cent more food than solo diners and women with obesity eating socially consumed up to 29 per cent more than when eating alone.

Plants can tell the time, and this affects their responses to certain herbicides used in agriculture according to new research led by the University of Bristol. The study, in collaboration with Syngenta, found that plant circadian rhythms regulate the sensitivity of plants to a widely used herbicide according to the time of day.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham are searching for volunteers to take part in a new study to see whether eating a Mediterranean-style diet and being more physically active could improve brain function and reduce dementia risk. A Mediterraneanstyle diet is rich in fruit, vegetables, nuts and legumes, wholegrain cereals, fish and olive oil with limited intake of dairy foods, red meat and confectionary, such as sweet pastries.

Obesity is increasing more rapidly in the world's rural areas than in cities, according to a new study of global trends in body-mass index (BMI). The research analysed the height and weight data of more than 112 million adults across urban and rural areas of 200 countries and territories between 1985 and 2017.

More needs to be done to tackle modern slavery in supply chains in Brazil - one of the world's biggest suppliers of beef and an important source of timber. Whilst some businesses in Brazil are already putting measures in place to tackle modern slavery in their supply chains, there is a lack of consistency in approach, action is voluntary, and initiatives are frequently limited to specific communities or locations, according to new research.

Growing meat in the laboratory may do more damage to the climate in the long run than meat from cattle, according to new research. In a first-of-its-kind study from the LEAP (Livestock, Environment and People) programme at the Oxford Martin School, the climate-change impact of several production methods for lab-grown and farmed beef was assessed accounting for the differing greenhouse gases produced.

"Beer before wine and you'll feel fine; wine before beer and you'll feel queer" goes the age-old aphorism. But scientists have now shown that it doesn't matter how you order your drinks - if you drink too much, you're still likely to be ill. Unpleasant as hangovers are, we should remember that they do have one important benefit..

A fresh look by the University of Bristol at how teenagers are affected by their asthma, eczema or obesity has some reassuring findings published in BMJ Open today (Monday 21 January). Researchers supported by the NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre found that both girls and boys at the ages of 12, 14 and 16 did not experience different levels of active or sedentary time if they had asthma or eczema compared to their peers.