Chewy Chew bell peppers with Cheese

Watch children make healthy living choices!

animation by Judy Wilken/Evan Thompson

After you read this book to your child, ask him/her, "Who's got the yuckiest lunch at school?" This will open the door to your child's behavior with other children. Pay attention to how your child describes the 'yuckiest' food. This description could be the description of the other child.

mango curd

Smitten Kitchen hides this curd between layers of a wedding cake. But there are many more uses of mango curd than that. I have used it in ice cream toppings, and between pancakes or inside of parmesan shells with other fruit. It's great when you mix this curd with fresh strawberries and blueberries too.

Out of their kitchens and into school cafeterias...

Cashew Seed Extract an Effective Anti-Diabetic, Study Shows

The goal of the study was to examine the impact of leaves, bark, seeds and apples from cashew trees, native to northeastern Brazil and other countries of the southern hemisphere, on cells that respond to insulin.

Crab, Mango, and Avocado Salad with Citrus Dressing

With this recipe you can use chicken, tofu, or other proteins sources.

click on image to download free pdf

"The best French Country cuisine around. "

Carmel, California

831-624-8977

Early Childhood Diet May Influence Future Health

Blueberries give your child essential antioxidants.

The Best Diet Ever recommends:

Soy- 8-10 grams tofu, soy nuts, soy milk or edamame a day. Berries – one cup per day for antioxidants. Broccoli - 1/2 cup of cooked broccoli or other cruciferous veggies a day. Onions – 1/4 cup of onions, garlic, leeks or shallots. Tomatoes - 1/2 cup cooked or 1 cup raw tomatoes three times a week.

5 of nature's best cancer-preventing foods

Dr. John Farquhar has seen thousands of patients try to beat cancer with aggressive chemotherapy treatments that "blast them with terrible side effects."

Let Them Eat Sugar: A New Guide For Feeding Kids

Matthew Amster-Burton, the author of the new memoir-style cookbook Hungry Monkey, says there's no reason a baby shouldn't eat sushi, bacon-jalapeno pizza or chocolate malt milkshakes.

Longer Life Linked To Specific Foods In Mediterranean Diet

While several studies have concluded that the Mediterranean diet improves chances of living longer, this is the first to investigate the importance of individual components of the diet.

Bringing it all back home

Five servings of fruits and vegetables a day? That's what the nutritionists tell us our children need. This is much easier to fill when a group of young passionate entrepreneurs are working hard to deliver all those veggies and fruits to our homes. Planet Organic's fresh locally grown sweet potatoes and acorn squash, fuyu persimmons (the other orange) are a few of the seasonal picks this month Planet Organics can deliver to your door . Try them.

It takes only 26 calories to lift an SUV

Michael Bauer of Between Meals column in the San Francisco Chronicle writes about energy in food in 2007.

Back in 2007 we sent an article about the energy in food to the Between Meals columnist Michael Bauer at the San Francisco Chronicle. He found it so interesting and surprising he wrote about our efforts to increase the awareness of calories in food. Some readers understood it, some did not.

Now, in 2010 it appears our legislative bodies, our schools, our restaurants, our grocery stores are beginning to understand the process that creates energy from burning matter, food. The ninety billion dollar a year medical tab for our obesity problem in this country is bound to lower significantly if we only stick with it and make sure our children eat more fresh veggies and fruit and get plenty of exercise at school and at home.

We have created an image that will help you and your child focus on healthy living. Take a look at our Do you hear the call poster. Hang it up in the kitchen. Talk to your children about this image. This image will make it a lot easier to put some of these fresh veggies and fruits onto your plate each and every day. Do you hear the call poster

Sniffing Out Local Gems

Mr. Willetts. "Every restaurant uses micro herbs as garnish these days. Why buy them in when you can use local, unusual produce that no one thinks about using?'

Picking green gardens: personal backyard farmers grow popular

It's more like farming by the foot. And the 6-foot-4 ex-Marine, skinny as a snap bean, says he can barely keep up with demand.

Radishes with Arugula Scallion Pesto

Can a Vegetable Garden Save You Money?

“yes” – if done correctly.

Carmel Farmers Markets

Ed Bruske is responsible for popularizing the political movement in Washington DC for school gardens and healthier school food. We are indebted to this one individual for helping advertise healthy school lunches for our children.

During the past 15 years, the global cocoa industry has confronted a trio of devastating fungal diseases that cost growers an estimated $700 million in losses annually.

Science picks through the chocolate nuggets

Julia Zumpano, a clinical dietician in the department of preventive cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, recommends no more than an ounce of 70% dark chocolate per day — or half that for those trying to lose or control their weight. (Dark, not milk or white chocolate, is dense in flavonoids.)

Sequencing The Cacao Genome To Safeguard Chocolate

The global chocolate market is worth $75 billion annually. Scientists report that the three most important and damaging cacao diseases are black pod, frosty pod, and witches' broom. Black pod occurs worldwide and has the largest impact, while frosty pod and witches' broom are restricted to tropical America.

Moderate Chocolate Consumption Linked to Lower Risks of Heart Failure, Study Finds

Women who ate an average of one to two servings of the high-quality chocolate per week had a 32 percent lower risk of developing heart failure

Cocoa-Crazy

My civic-minded side came through towards the end as I stopped at the Divine Chocolate table.

Chocolate, Wine And Tea Improve Brain Performance

All that chocolate might actually help finish the bumper Christmas crossword over the seasonal period.

New Cocoa Varieties Needed to Secure World’s Chocolate Supply

Our project aims to devise long term strategies that will be required to breed new cocoa varieties which are better suited to climates likely to exist in the future."

Bahama Billy's Island Steakhouse

Carmel, California

831-626-0430

How Fish Is Cooked Affects Heart-Health Benefits of Omega-3 Fatty Acids

"Our findings can help educate people on how much fish to eat and how to cook it to prevent heart disease," Meng said.

Identifying sustainable seafood can be a fishing expedition

Seafood is the most direct way consumers connect to the life of the ocean. Conservation groups such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium encourage the consumption of sustainable seafood - meaning seafood caught in a way that doesn't harm the ocean or deplete the supply.

Blue Ocean Institute

This wallet sized card helps consumers educate themselves. When I go out to eat I take this little card with me. The key that is used separates the various kinds of fish according to its abundance and damages caused by the way it is farmed.

Soft-Shell Crabs Created On Demand?

National Geographic video is excellent!

To read more on molting go to:

Clues that the miracle of molting is near

Sustainable Fisheries Needed for Global Food Security

Eco-lableing raises the price for some seafood but this only causespeople to look for lower price seafood that the poorer people are eating. Then the lower priced seafood goes up in price. What would you do?

Is it red snapper? What's red snapper? Palumbi lab checks the DNA

Join Dr. Steve Palumbi of Stanford University and Lynne Rossetto Kaspar, host of "The Splendid Table", as they use DNA to solve the Case of the Counterfeit Fish.

Boosting Coastal Economics With Crustacean Molting On Demand

Ever go to the fish market for crab and there isn't one to be found? "They are molting," you are told. Now, scientists are discovering how to manipulate that process and generate new jobs and insure profits in the blue crab fishing industry, an industry that is valued at nearly $50 million a year in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Soon we will be able to buy blue crab all year round with its soft, easy to eat exoskeleton!

Palumbi Lab

Better to Be Fat and Fit Than Skinny and Unfit

This article will surprise you!

This one activity can start your child understanding fractions, food science and more.

Energy is in a kiss

Twenty-Six Calories Can Lift an SUV

If this is so, no wonder many children in this age of high tech are suffering from obesity. They aren't 'walking the walk', literally!

This is a furnace, just like your body. It burns matter and releases energy from the chemical bonds in that matter. When you eat, you break molecules apart and release their energy to do work for you. You use this energy to walk around, run, jump, sleep, digest, play — just get through each day. In order to appreciate how much energy is in food, some scientists have decided to link the idea of how many calories it takes to lift an SUV off the ground with the number of calories in a food. This is called the concept of equivalence. This equivalence goes like this: There are 26 calories in one chocolate kiss. This is equivalent to the amount of energy it takes to lift 1 SUV off the ground.

As you read the number of calories in each of McDonald's foods, or any food, you can get an idea of the vast amount of energy in food by making an equivalence between the number of calories in the food and the number of SUVs you can lift with that amount of calories. For example, once you know that 26 calories is equivalent to lifting 1 SUV above the ground, then you can figure out how many SUVs you can lift by eating 1 260 calorie hamburger from McDonald's. 260/26 = 10 SUVs can be lifted off the ground.

As StarChild Science teaches, 'There is nothing between us and nature but energy and information'. Unfortunately, the amount of energy in food is huge. That is why it is important for us to exercise often to get rid of the extra energy in the food that we have eaten that we don't use. If we don't run it off, then we store it as fat. And that is where obesity comes from.

Throughout this site you will often see the expression 'energy conservation'. It is an expression that is currently everywhere in the news, connected to many different arenas. We read it in articles about ethanol production, alternative fuel research, heating costs, food science, dieting, obesity, agriculture, fashion, airline industry, housing industry, forestry, ocean health, just to name a few.

The graphic above showing the temperature of water inside the box rising as heat is released from food should be on all science sites and in all classrooms, no matter what grade level. This is a fundamental depiction of the conservation of energy. Energy in nature is conserved meaning it is kept in some form or other, work or heat. Energy does not just vanish in nature like your money in your bank account can do. It is kept in some form at all times, in all circumstances. Most importantly, this conservation law is what keeps us living systems alive.

backtotop

Animation of the dragon seen on this page is licensed to StarChild Science by "animated.gif(c)KittyRoach"