Ace Food Desk – An artificial sweetener called neotame can cause significant harm to the gut, my colleagues and I discovered. It does this harm in two ways. One is by breaking down the layer of cells that line the intestine. And two, by causing previously healthy gut bacteria to become diseased, resulting in them invading the gut wall. 

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published:Apr.30: 2024: The Conversation By Havovi Chichger Published: April 26, 2024 5.45pm BST: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/YouMeUs2 

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, is the first to show this double-hit negative effect of neotame on the gut, resulting in damage similar to that seen in inflammatory bowel disease and sepsis.

To reduce childhood obesity, six years ago this month, the UK government introduced a soft drinks industry levy. This “sugar tax” required a levy to be paid for any soft drink – equivalent to manufacturers adding 72p for a three-litre bottle of soft drink.

Since the levy was introduced, there has been a nearly 50% decrease in the average sugar content of soft drinks. While reducing sugar content certainly addresses childhood obesity, it does not give the same sweet taste perception that consumers are used to experiencing in their diet. That’s where artificial sweeteners can make a real difference. 

Artificial sweeteners are chemical compounds that are up to 600 times sweeter than sugar with very few (if any) calories and are cheap and easy for manufacturers to use. 

Traditional artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame potassium (acesulfame K) have been found in a wide range of foods and drinks for many years as a way to increase the sweet taste without adding significant calories or costs. 

However, in the last few years, there has been controversy in the field. Several studies have suggested potential health harms associated with consuming these sweeteners, ranging from gastrointestinal disease to dementia.

Although none of these harms have been proved, it has paved the way for new sweeteners to be developed to try to avoid any possible health issues. These next-generation sweeteners are up to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar, have no calories and no aftertaste (a common complaint with traditional sweeteners). An example of this new type of sweetener is neotame.

Neotame was developed as an alternative to aspartame with the aim of being a more stable and sweet version of the traditional sweetener. It is very stable at high temperatures, which means it is a good additive to use in baked goods. It is also used in soft drinks and chewing gum.

Neotame has been approved for use in more than 35 countries, including the UK, although the European Food Safety Agency is currently reviewing the sweetener as part of a series of evidence‐based risk assessments of certain sweeteners. 

While neotame has been shown to change the profile of gut bacteria, very little research has investigated the effect of neotame at the cellular level. 

Kills the cells that line the gut 🧱

The new study my colleagues and I conducted aimed to fill that gap in our knowledge. We used a cell model of the human intestine and model bacteria from the human gut microbiota to study how neotame consumed in the diet could affect gut health. 

We found that, at higher concentrations, neotame can kill the cells that line the gut wall and, at lower concentrations, the sweetener can cause the gut to become more susceptible to leaks.

Both these effects could result in inflammation of the intestine, which is linked to inflammatory bowel disease and sepsis. 

We found that exposure of human gut cells to the acceptable daily intake, as decided by food safety agencies, of neotame causes cells to die. However, it is worth noting that, because neotame is so intensely sweet, it is unlikely that a person would consume enough sweetener in their daily diet to achieve this amount. 

At lower concentrations of neotame, which could be seen in the diet, we still found a breakdown of the gut barrier was sufficient to be associated with an increased chance of infection in the body. 

In the gut bacteria models, a type of E coli and E faecalis, neotame did not kill the bacteria but instead increased their ability to form “biofilms”. When bacteria form a biofilm, they cluster together as a protective mechanism which makes them more resistant to antibiotics. Our study also shows that neotame increases the ability of the E coli to invade and kill human gut cells. 

These findings are very similar to those with traditional sweeteners, such as sucralose and aspartame, in terms of their effect on gut bacteria and human gut cells. 

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– Foraging for food is an innate behaviour in humans, something our ancestors have been doing for millennia — and fungi are among the  Bush

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published:Apr.20: 2024: ABC AU Food & Health News TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/YouMeUs2 

A fascination with fungi: But how dangerous is it to forage for wild mushrooms in Australia without having the requisite knowledge of what you’re looking for and the appropriate understanding of the potentially catastrophic consequences of getting it wrong?

Sandra Tuszynska is an agricultural scientist based in Queensland’s South Burnett region, on Wakka Wakka country. She was drawn to microbiology and mycology (fungi science) after becoming fascinated by the symbiotic relationship fungi have with flora, and their ability to break down toxic chemicals and regenerate landscapes in an ecologically sustainable way. “ They’ve got this suite of enzymes and acids and they can do amazing things — anything from getting minerals from rock, all the way to decomposing some of the most horrendous toxins,” Dr Tuszynska says.

They’re good at that [but] they’re not such a great food source for humans, in a way.

“I see it that way because I’m looking at their function in the ecosystem, and how good they are at absorbing lots of crazy stuff into themselves. So, when a polluted environment is present, you don’t want to be going and foraging for those mushrooms, for example.”

Vice-president of the Queensland Mycological Society, Patrick Leonard, lives on Kabi Kabi country on the Sunshine Coast but has fond memories of foraging for fungi as a small child in England.

I was brought up on a farm and we used to collect wild mushrooms, the field mushrooms (agaricus campestris), and we used to take them home, fry them up for breakfast, and they were wonderful,” he says.

“ I still remember to this day, that feeling of this thing that you collected, that hadn’t cost you any money, had a wonderful taste and didn’t do you any harm, because I went with somebody who thought they knew what they were doing.”

The dangers of misidentifying mushrooms

There has been a renewed focus on the dangers of consuming wild-foraged fungi following the ongoing legal case surrounding the deaths of three people in the Victorian town of Leongatha last year, and this week’s death of Melbourne woman Rachael Dixon, who died after ingesting a drink made with mushrooms.

There have also been four recorded deaths in the ACT attributed to the ingestion of death cap mushrooms since 2002, a fungus Mr Leonard says “attacks your major organs and once you’ve had enough of it, it’s very difficult to do anything about counteracting”.@acenewsservices

Although Mr Leonard is quick to point out that high-profile incidents such as these are relatively rare, he says many cases of misidentification occur because people are overconfident in their abilities to identify a mushroom they have often learnt about in an overseas country and “apply that information and knowledge here — and it doesn’t work”.

A case in point is the agaricus bisporus variety, better known as the cultivated mushroom and the most common variety sold in grocery stores and supermarkets.

“The main cause of people getting crook here — and this is not a deadly mushroom, but it could make you quite sick — is that they’ll pick an agaricus that looks just like supermarket one; it’s got a white cap, it’s got a white stem and you look at the gills underneath and they’re a chocolate colour.

“ But if you cut it in half, you will see this bright, orangey-yellow colour in the bottom of the stem and that means it’s agaricus xanthodermus and that is one that will really make you sick.”

It also has an unpleasant odour that Mr Leonard warns is only perceptible to about 80 per cent of people, which is why he advises against relying on books or photographs and instead recommends going on organised foraging expeditions with knowledgeable experts. “ You can’t get smells through a photograph, can you? And photographs don’t normally show you the mushroom cut in half, so that’s the sort of thing you’ll actually learn on a proper foray.”

Even experts are wary

It’s a sentiment echoed by Dr Tuszynska who, despite her experience in the field, is reluctant to eat wild-foraged mushrooms because of the risk involved.

“ There is a saying: ‘all mushrooms are edible — only once’,” she says.

“Of course, what I’m saying is don’t … because it might be your last taste.”

Mr Leonard also notes “there are also people that want to get a high from mushrooms”. He warns that the amount of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound produced by some fungi, can vary wildly between different species and individual mushrooms.

He also says there is “a dosage effect, like there is with most medicines” and can induce stronger reactions in some people than others.

There’s a lot we don’t know

Dr Tuszynska also fondly recalls collecting wild mushrooms as a child in her native Poland, “where people foraged because that was part of their staple”.

“You had a family member, particularly grandparents, that could take you out and had the knowledge, and knew exactly how to identify the edible ones from those that weren’t, because obviously, the experiment fails when you eat it and you die — and that’s how people probably learnt [in previous generations].

“ It’s a culture that’s been developed and we’ve lost a lot of cultural knowledge in Australia.

“I’m sure there’s lots of amazing food mushrooms, but we don’t know … don’t go out there and try to eat something that might kill you.”

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AceFoodDesk – Chef, author, and food writer Kim O’Donnel explains that home cooking is serious business, but we don’t have to take it so seriously

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published:Apr.20: 2024: Civil Eats News by Lisa Held Published: April 15, 2024: A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/YouMeUs2 

The thing is, home cooking is a serious business. It is a conscious decision to turn raw ingredients into a meal to nourish ourselves and the people we love,” she wrote. “The food system is more than crops and livestock; it’s what we humans do with them.”

More than a decade later, O’Donnel believes the connections between farms, our kitchens, and sharing food around a table are even more important. In the era of DoorDash, Instacart, and QR-code menus, when eating has become increasingly digital and passive, cooking can be a revolutionary act, she said, providing an avenue for active, sensory engagement with our own nourishment. But that doesn’t mean the kitchen needs to be a realm of lofty pursuits. In fact, O’Donnel kept coming back to the opposite idea in a recent interview. To get more people cooking, she said, we need to “lower our expectations.” Instead of mastering a technique, learn basic knife skills. Instead of obsessing over a certain diet, give yourself permission to change things up.

How do you describe your approach to cooking?

We spoke to O’Donnel about these ideas, and she shared tips and tricks to turn cooking into a simple, rewarding, lifelong practice.

I am one of those people who can open up the refrigerator and figure out what we’re going to have for dinner. My husband always marvels at that. I actually get great satisfaction from scrounging and coming up with something that tastes really good. I think about what I have on hand and how I can incorporate something that might be new. And what time of year is it? I do a lot of preserving, and so I have enough crushed tomatoes in jars that I can have at least one quart a month. So, recently, I yanked one of those, and I had some beans that I had cooked a few days before. I did a sort of a riff on a minestrone, but no pasta.

I don’t think about fancy. I think about something that’s simple but feels really good in the body. I think of cooking as a practice in many ways, like any other practice that’s good for your body.

I’ve been practicing yoga for more than 20 years. And of course cooking is about the fuel for your body, but there’s also something spiritually and emotionally nurturing. One could even say that when you cook for yourself and for others, you are parenting yourself or parenting somebody.

I cook the same way, but I think a lot of people find it intimidating and feel like they need to start with a recipe. Has that been your experience with students? Is it more challenging, or does it take more practice?

Good question. I’m thinking right now about this guy named Edward Espe Brown. He is a monk, but he also wrote cookbooks. Many years ago, I interviewed him. He kept talking about this idea of letting your hands be hands. In the age of handheld devices . . . can you just be in your five physical senses? I know that may sound very woo-woo, but he was pointing to this performance anxiety that our culture has around cooking.

There’s this whole notion of “think like a chef” or “mastering the art of . . .” There’s this yearning to make it more meaningful or to feel like, “Wow, that’s a really big win, making that dish.” But you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to recreate this thing on a weeknight when you might have worked. You might have had to pick up a kid. You might have had a really shitty day. Cookbooks are wonderful because they give us ideas and they inspire us. But are we being realistic?

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