Ten Little-known Food Facts
- Peanut Butter is good for you. It’s high-fat, so don’t go overboard, but a tablespoon of peanut butter on a slice of whole-grain bread is a good source of iron, fiber and protein, and it fills you up. This article claims that it even may help to prevent type two diabetes in women!
- Fortune Cookies didn’t originate in China. They were invented in California, but no one seems to know exactly by whom. You can make your own after seeing the video below!
- Drinking 8 glasses of water a day is an urban myth. You should drink plenty of liquids, more if you are perspiring or if you’re an athlete, but we also get lots of liquid naturally from fruits and vegetables. A panel investigating this came to the conclusion: the vast majority of healthy people adequately meet their daily hydration needs by letting thirst be their guide.
- The food colorants cochineal and carmine are made from ground bugs. This is true, according to Snopes.com. But it’s not as icky as it may seem. Many societies eat bugs as a part of their regular diets, and bugs are very healthy! They’re low fat, high protein and according to the growing numbers of insect-eaters, truly yummy. I suggest not eating them except at Halloween, and then only as gummy worms. A better alternative for protein would be anything in MagicKitchen.com’s meat dishes.
- A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top. True! [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRwbeivm8n4[/youtube]
- Here’s one that you can prove or disprove for me: The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for Blood plasma. This site says it’s true: http://allnurses-central.com/Coconut.
Note that it’s the coconut water from a green coconut, not coconut milk, which is made from the flesh of ripe coconuts. - It takes approximately two million flowers for a bee to make 1 lb of honey. The bees will also fly about 50,000 miles to make the pound.
- The first soup ever made was made from a hippopotamus. Source: Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. 1993. A History of Food. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
- The banana tree is actually a giant herb and the banana is actually a berry. Berries are identified as being many seeded with a fleshy inner layer.
- Pineapple is a natural anti-inflammatory and pain-killer. It’s high in the enzyme bromelain. In a clinical study of adults who experienced mild acute knee pain for three months or less, bromelain demonstrated anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties, reducing the symptoms of osteo- and rheumatoid arthritis.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80beqJ1t_1k[/youtube]
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