Target’s Simply Balanced collection will eliminate all GMOs by the end of 2014. Simply Balanced products currently exclude 105 common food additive ingredients, and the vast majority of the items within the collection are made without GMOs. The collection is crafted to be free of artificial flavors, colors and preservatives, and avoids high fructose corn syrup. It never uses trans fats, is mindful about the amount of sodium in each product, and forty percent of the products are organic.

The Simply Balanced collection offers nearly 250 products across snacks, pasta, beverages, frozen seafood, dairy and cereal. The collection ranges in price from $1 for water to $14.99 for seafood. Key nutrition attributes are highlighted on the front of Simply Balanced packages to help guests find the products that meet their individual nutrition goals and wellness lifestyle needs.

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Dear Folks,
He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how. — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) Philosopher
Do not get caught in the normal meanings of the qualities. With a Nimble mind you can move from one idea to another easily. This is one of the Mirthful joys of life.
Peace,
Jim
            MIRTHFUL
Definition: jovial; festive; full of merriment
Synonyms: Mirth implies general lightness of heart and love of gaiety; glee stresses exultation shown in laughter, cries of joy or delight; hilarity suggests loud or irrepressible laughter or high‑spirited boisterousness; jollity suggests exuberance or exultant playfulness.
            NIMBLE
Definitions: (1) light and quick in motion; moving with ease and celerity; lively; swift; (2) clever conception, comprehension, or resourcefulness; (3) sensitive; responsive <a nimble listener>
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An experimental apartment building in Hamburg, Germany is harnessing the power of the sun to generate power, but not in the way you expect. Photovoltaic cells are totally yesterdays news — the BIQ building gathers power using a bioreactor façade packed full of microalgae.

Large clear panels on the front of the building are where the microalgae are growing. These microscopic organisms behave like any other plant. They absorb sunlight, process carbon dioxide, and produce oxygen. The algae flourish in a regular cycle, with the mature plants being harvested on occasion.

The process is highly efficient as it results in no additional carbon output, and algae produce more biomass by area than any other plant. Any light that is not absorbed by the algae can be captured by the façade and used to directly heat water or air when it’s chilly out. Failing either of those immediate needs, the heat can be piped down into borehole heat exchangers (an 80-meter deep hole filled with brine) for later use.

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

Before the latest G8 meeting at the start of June, several summits aimed at addressing the prevalence of malnutrition were held in London, culminating in the signing of the Nutrition for Growth Compact. However, agreements on a heightened role for private businesses and the use of genetically modified crops have proven to be more controversial, and civil society groups have been vocal in their condemnation – referring to some of the measures a “new wave of colonialism”.

Countries joining the New Alliance will be expected to facilitate access to land (including communally held land), and enact intellectual property laws around seed which will criminalise age-old agricultural practices among Africa’s peasant farmers, including the saving and sharing of seed. The targets of the biotech industry (and their grovelling politician-allies) are the staple crops that people depend on, so that there would be no escaping them. Crops genetically engineered either for nutrition reasons or otherwise pose a wide range of threats – including to biodiversity.

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Omega-3 fatty acids have previously been linked to protective benefits against heart disease and Alzheimer’s. Now one study is showing that eating the fatty acids found in fish oils may increase the risk of prostate cancer for men.

The study showed that men who consume a lot of EPA, DPA and DHA — three anti-inflammatory, metabolically-related fatty acids that come from fatty fish and fish-oil supplements — have a 43 percent increased chance of developing prostate cancer. Men with diets high in fatty acids were also shown to have a 71 percent increased risk of developing high-grade prostate cancer, and a 44 percent higher chance of having low-grade prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer will affect an estimated 238,590 new patients in 2013, according to the National Cancer Institute. About 29,720 prostate cancer patients will die from the disease this year.

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A company whose signature product is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic is involved in the credentialing of the professionals who are tasked with educating us about the epidemic.

Coca-Cola isn’t the only corporate giant influencing the conversation on healthful eating habits. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the country’s largest trade association for nutrition professionals, has for years been accepting sponsorships from what many describe as “Big Junk Food”: PepsiCo Inc. (NYSE:PEP), Hershey Co. (NYSE:HSY), General Mills Inc. (NYSE:GIS) and Kellogg Co. (NYSE:K) are just some of the companies listed as partners or sponsors in its 2012 annual report. Sponsorships — offered at various levels — help support the Academy’s various events and activities, with top-level sponsors (“partners”) given the opportunity to present educational sessions to Academy members.

Despite its proletariat-sounding name, the Academy is more than a simple trade group. It’s involved, either directly or indirectly, in almost every stage of becoming and remaining a registered dietitian. Both the accreditation council for dieticians’ educational programs and the agency that oversees RD credentialing operate under the Academy’s umbrella, though the organization says they operate independently of the Academy’s governing bodies.

Among the major food companies, it’s Coca-Cola that seems most interested in molding the minds of RDs. Its Beverage Institute features more than two-dozen free nutrition seminars, all accredited and officially sanctioned by the Academy’s Commission on Dietetic Registration.

Weaning the Academy off junk-food money may prove just as challenging as weaning Americans off junk food.

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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have accomplished a stunning architectural feat using silkworms. To construct this “Silk Pavillion,” 6,500 live silkworms were guided via computer, creating a 3D print of the domed structure. Students at MIT studied the worms’ spinning patterns and tested whether they could control them by altering the worms’ environment.

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Have you been the victim of food fraud? Are there foods you won’t eat for fear of being tricked? As evidenced by Europe’s recent horsemeat scandal — in which scores of products labeled as “beef” were found to contain up to 100 percent horse meat —together with arrests last spring of Chinese traders who were allegedly peddling rat meat as lamb, there’s still considerable mystery around where a lot of our food originates.

“Unfortunately, controlling the amount of fraud that occurs daily in the food industry is next to impossible,” said Michael Roberts, a professor of food law and policy at UCLA and director of the Center for Food Law and Policy. “Almost anything can be adulterated in some way,” he added, “either to persuade consumers to buy something for their health, or by diluting it to save money on the supplier end.”

Seafood made headlines earlier this year when Oceana, an international nonprofit dedicated to ocean conservation, issued a report announcing that one-third of the fish sampled during a nationwide survey was incorrectly labeled.

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As regional shortages of fresh water become more prevalent, solar distillation using a single-effect basin holds promise as a method to bring low-cost, clean, and ecologically-responsible water to remote area dwellers. Compound parabolic concentrators (CPCs) can be used to direct more light onto the still increasing the throughput and efficiency of these passive solar devices. A computer program has been developed that uses the properties of materials and the solar energy characteristics of the site to calculate the increase in output of water due to reflectors of different height. For reflector 2.5 times the width of the still, the output per unit area per day roughly triples with only ~10% increase in cost and moderate maintenance (weekly tilts), indicating that CPCs have a significant economic advantage in producing solar distilled water.

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Ashok Gadgil of Berkeley Lab has developed a low-cost and highly efficient method to remove arsenic from water to less than 10 parts per billion (ppb) – the World Health Organization and U.S. EPA standard for drinking water. The technology has been tested in Bangladesh and Cambodia and proven effective. The cost of the treatment is projected to be substantially less than current technologies because it uses a material that is already a waste product to remove the arsenic.

This invention “Arsenic Removal Using Bottom Ash” or ARUBA is based on coating the surfaces of particles of bottom ash (a finely powdered and sterile waste material from coal-fired power plants) with ferric (hydr)oxide . The manufacturing process is conducted at room-temperature and atmospheric pressure. Thus, the material can be produced with relatively simple equipment at low cost.

Removing arsenic from contaminated drinking water is simple. ARUBA is mixed into the water, where it reacts with and immobilizes arsenic by adsorption and/or co-precipitation. The resulting complex can be filtered or settled out of the water, and is safe enough for disposal in municipal landfills, per EPA standards.

Bottom ash is much less expensive than solid ferric oxide particles, which are often used as a filter media to bond arsenic species. Moreover, it has a high surface to volume ratio meaning that less material is required for water treatment, and hence less waste is produced.

The cost of raw materials needed for ARUBA production is expected to be low- less than 0.5 cents ($0.005) per kg ARUBA. Based on field results over three trips to Bangladesh in 2007 and 2008, treating 1 liter of Bangladesh groundwater at an initial arsenic concentration of 400 ppb requires approximately 4-5 grams of ARUBA

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