Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Oil: Cancer, Taste, and Coffee Beer
Evening primrose oil shows promise as a source of new breast cancer treatments. One of its components, gamma-linolenic acid, interferes with the Her-2/neu receptor gene which is characteristic of many very virulent cancers. That's pretty cool.
It turns out that rodents (and maybe humans) have a sixth taste on their tongues - sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami and fatty. This doesn't shock me - encouraging fat consumption would have been an advantage before agriculture - but it's very cool to discover something new.
Sometimes things are best left undiscovered. I think that's how I feel about Nestlé's newly patented product: coffee beer (pdf). It's not coffee, it's not beer, but it has some similarities to each. Why on earth anyone would want a foaming, fermented (but non-alcoholic) coffee-flavored drink, instead of, say, an iced coffee, is beyond me. Ew. EwEwEwEwEeeeewwwww.
It turns out that rodents (and maybe humans) have a sixth taste on their tongues - sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami and fatty. This doesn't shock me - encouraging fat consumption would have been an advantage before agriculture - but it's very cool to discover something new.
Sometimes things are best left undiscovered. I think that's how I feel about Nestlé's newly patented product: coffee beer (pdf). It's not coffee, it's not beer, but it has some similarities to each. Why on earth anyone would want a foaming, fermented (but non-alcoholic) coffee-flavored drink, instead of, say, an iced coffee, is beyond me. Ew. EwEwEwEwEeeeewwwww.
