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Beans give Rwandans a high protein diet, but storage is difficult and cooking fires deplete forests. Kirk Dolan and graduate student George Nyombaire developed an extruded bean product that can be a snack or, ground up, a base for porridge. Extruder cooking is more efficient and cleaner than open fires, and the finished product is easy to keep from weevils. Perhaps best: both products passed taste tests in Rwanda. Environmental factors like peer pressure and perceived societal expectations only partly explain eating disorders. Using statistical modeling techniques in studies of 500 female twins, Kelly Klump found that before puberty, environmental factors account for the development of eating disorders. But during and after puberty, genes account for more than half of a girl’s risk for developing an eating disorder. Pamela Fraker studies the impact of zinc and other nutrients on immune systems. She found that a deficiency of zinc—a global dietary problem and a side effect of chronic diseases like AIDS, Crohn’s disease, and sickle cell anemia—causes the body to increase production of glucocorticoids, the steroid hormones that regulate carbohydrate metabolism. That in turn accelerates the death of developing white blood cells needed to fight infection. Lactating dairy cows produce more methane than other domestic livestock. Feeding them coconut oil, with its medium-chain fatty acids, may reduce production of that greenhouse gas in the bovine digestive tract by as much as half. David Beede and graduate student Marcus Hollmann mix the oil into feed and measure changes in methane and ammonia emissions to learn whether the diet additive works without appreciably reducing feed intake and milk production. Everybody eats potatoes, including pests like the potato tuber moths and the Colorado potato beetle. Since potatoes have a narrow genetic base and reproduce asexually, it’s difficult to breed conventionally for desirable traits. David Douches found that inserting genes of a natural soil bacterium produced moth-resistant potatoes that farmers can use to protect their crop. Field tests in Africa are being closely watched in other countries. |
David Beede, Meadows Professor of animal science, 517-432-5400 Kirk Dolan, associate professor of food science and human nutrition, 517-355-8474x119 David Douches, professor of crop and soil sciences, 517-355-0271x1194 Pamela Fraker, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, 517-353-3513 Kelly Klump, associate professor of psychology, 517-432-9861 |
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