A tasty vegetarian salad could be the fresh meal that fuels a space flight to Mars, a new study contends. Researchers came up with the salad while searching for the optimal “space meal” that would supplement prepackaged foods on long voyages between planets. The salad contains soybeans, poppy seeds, barley, kale, peanuts, sweet potato, and sunflower seeds, according to a report in the journal ACS Food Science & Technology. These ingredients meet male astronauts’ special nutritional needs and can be grown in space, the researchers said. Astronauts in space burn more calories than humans on Earth do, researchers said in background notes. They also require extra nutrients like calcium to stay healthy during extended periods of weightlessness. Previous efforts have explored ways to grow food in space, but no specific fresh meals have been developed for future space travel, noted senior researcher Volker Hessel, a professor of sustainable chemical engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia. For this study, researchers assessed combinations of fresh ingredients that could be grown in space because they require less water, fertilizer, time and area. They also considered whether inedible portions of the grown foods could be recycled onboard a spaceship. After settling on their space salad, the researchers whipped one up and subjected it to an Earthbound taste test for four people. One tester raved about the salad,…  read on >  read on >

You may think that artificial sweeteners can help you lose some weight, but a new study finds they are no good for your gut’s microbiome. People who use aspartame (Equal), sucralose (Splenda), saccharin (Sweet’N Low), or stevia leaf extract tended to have intestinal bacteria colonies that differed significantly from those of people who didn’t use sugar substitutes, researchers found. They had less rich colonies of bacteria in their small intestines or, even worse, higher levels of bacteria that churn out harmful toxins. “Artificial sweeteners are not benign for the microbiome of the gut,” said study author Dr. Ruchi Mathur, a professor and endocrinologist with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. More than 140 million Americans use artificial sweeteners to lower their sugar intake, researchers said in background notes. However, concerns have been raised that sugar substitutes don’t help with long-term weight loss and might be tied to increased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, researchers said. The gut microbiome plays a key role in a person’s health, and diet can influence the makeup of these bacteria in significant ways. So, in a controlled study, researchers analyzed the microbial diversity of the small intestines in people who used artificial sweeteners, including nine who used aspartame and 35 who used other sugar substitutes. They compared the gut microbiome of those patients to a group of…  read on >  read on >

A diet laden with omega-3 fatty acids found in nuts and oily fish might help slow the progression of pulmonary fibrosis, researchers report. Pulmonary fibrosis is a relentless, potentially fatal disease where lung tissue scars and hardens over time. Often tied to smoking, the illness impairs lung function so that patients become short of breath, weak and disabled. The new study was led by Dr. John Kim, a pulmonary and critical care expert at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and UVA Health, in Charlottesville. His team tracked the health of 300 patients with interstitial lung disease — the class of respiratory ailments that includes pulmonary fibrosis. Most had “idiopathic” pulmonary fibrosis (meaning the exact cause of the illness is unknown) and most were men (males are more prone to the disease). Blood tests were taken to gauge each patient’s dietary intake of omega-3 fatty acids. The team found that “higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids were predictive of better clinical outcomes in pulmonary fibrosis,” Kim said in a university news release. Specifically, people with higher levels of the nutrient had lungs that were better able to exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen — a process necessary to life. They also were better able to survive without needing a lung transplant, the study found. “These findings were consistent whether [or not] you had a history of…  read on >  read on >