[Practical experiences with bacon therapy].

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of sociodemographic characteristics and baseline food habits on the dietary response to a nutritional intervention promoting the Mediterranean food pattern and maintenance of dietary modifications in 73 healthy women. The 12-week nutritional intervention in free-living conditions consisted of two group courses and seven individual sessions with a dietitian. A follow-up visit was performed 12 weeks after the end of the intervention (week 24). A Mediterranean dietary score was derived from a food frequency questionnaire, administered at 0, 6, 12 and 24 weeks. Marital status, socioeconomic level, educational level and household size did not seem to influence the dietary response, whereas women without children followed more closely dietary advice than women with children (OR, 3.6; 95% CI, 1.3-10.0). Planning food purchases in function of weekly discounts was also associated with better dietary response to the intervention (OR, 3.3; 95% CI, 1.3-8.8). Nutritional intervention promoting the Mediterranean food pattern was effective in modifying food habits of healthy women. The fact of having children or not and food purchase habits seem to influence the response to a nutritional intervention promoting the Mediterranean food pattern.

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PubMed2006

Engineering cottonseed for use in human nutrition by tissue-specific reduction of toxic gossypol.

Global cottonseed production can potentially provide the protein requirements for half a billion people per year; however, it is woefully underutilized because of the presence of toxic gossypol within seed glands. Therefore, elimination of gossypol from cottonseed has been a long-standing goal of geneticists. Attempts were made to meet this objective by developing so-called "glandless cotton" in the 1950s by conventional breeding techniques; however, the glandless varieties were commercially unviable because of the increased susceptibility of the plant to insect pests due to the systemic absence of glands that contain gossypol and other protective terpenoids. Thus, the promise of cottonseed in contributing to the food requirements of the burgeoning world population remained unfulfilled. We have successfully used RNAi to disrupt gossypol biosynthesis in cottonseed tissue by interfering with the expression of the delta-cadinene synthase gene during seed development. We demonstrate that it is possible to significantly reduce cottonseed-gossypol levels in a stable and heritable manner. Results from enzyme activity and molecular analyses on developing transgenic embryos were consistent with the observed phenotype in the mature seeds. Most relevant, the levels of gossypol and related terpenoids in the foliage and floral parts were not diminished, and thus their potential function in plant defense against insects and diseases remained untouched. These results illustrate that a targeted genetic modification, applied to an underutilized agricultural byproduct, provides a mechanism to open up a new source of nutrition for hundreds of millions of people.

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