Interesting Facts about Smoking

Smoking Overview:

In the United States:
• 20.6% of U.S. adults smoke
• 40% of non-smokers are exposed to secondhand smoke
• 54% of children are exposed to secondhand smoke
• Smoking causes 443,000 deaths every year!
In Kentucky:
• More than 8,000 Kentuckians will die this year from tobacco-related illnesses
• 28.6% of Kentucky adults smoke which is one of the highest rates in the nation
• 17% of Kentucky youth smoke

CHINA

• The facts about smoking in China are scary and getting scarier by the minute:
• It produces more tobacco than any other country.
• It has an estimated 350 million smokers — that's 1 in 3 of the world's smokers.
• 36% of the population smoke, including 70% of all Chinese men. Most of them have no knowledge of the facts about smoking or any awareness of the consequences they face.
• More than one million people a year die in China from tobacco-related diseases, including lung cancer and heart disease.
• These 1 million smokers were mainly aged 35-69 and this figure is predicted to increase to 2 mil in just 15 years.
• In fact the biggest killer in China is lung cancer, beating road accidents (and if you drive in China, you'll know what this means!).

CUBA — home of smooth cigars and black tobacco cigarettes:

• In an effort to have Cubans live longer, Fidel Castro issued a stop smoking resolution back in Feb 2005, banning smoking in enclosed public spaces, such as halls, theatres, sports facilities, transport, and designated areas in clubs and restaurants. Cubans laughed at the idea and mostly ignored this attack on their sacred vice, and the authorities are not interested in enforcing the ban.
• Castro himself quit chomping on cigars in 1986 to try and set a good example to other Cubans and to support his health ministry's anti-smoking efforts.
• Cubans took no notice and currently 40% of the population of 11.2 million smoke.
• The cheapest pack of cigs costs ½ a day's pay and one cheap cigar costs ¼ of a day's pay.
• Smoking death statistics for Cubans, that cancer and heart disease are the leading causes of death, with the highest percentage caused by smoking.
• Doctors are some of the heaviest smokers even though they were banned from smoking during work back in 1990.

ENGLAND & WALES
45,000 people die each year from COPD (chronic bronchitis and emphysema), or diseases precipitated by COPD, such as pneumonia, heart disease and stroke. Smoking is the leading cause of COPD. A smoker is 10 times more likely to die of COPD than a non-smoker. Global deaths are estimated to be 4.8 million.

How does smoking affect health?

• On average, adults who smoke cigarettes die 14 years earlier than non-smokers
• Harms nearly every organ in your body
• Causes coughing and wheezing
• Causes yellowing of teeth and fingernails
• Leading cause of cancer incidence and mortality
• Increases risk of developing heart disease
• Increases risk of having a stroke
• Increases risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
• Increases risk of hip fractures and cataracts
• Increases risk of pneumonia
• Women: increases risk of premature birth or low birth weight babies
• Women: increases risk of cervical cancer

Pap tests
• Men: increases risk of prostate cancer

How does secondhand smoke affect health?

• Secondhand smoke exposure is responsible for 49,400 deaths each year
• Known to cause cancer
Living with a smoker increases a non-smokers chance of lung cancer by 20-30%
• May trigger asthma attacks in non-smokers with asthma

Effects of secondhand smoke on children’s health
• Increased risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)
• Increased number of ear infections and colds
• Increased risk of pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma

What Happens When You Quit Smoking?

20 minutes
Blood pressure and heart rate return to normal
8 hours
Carbon monoxide in blood decreases to normal
24 hours
Risk of having a heart attack decreases
48 hours
Nerve endings start to regrow
Ability to taste and smell is enhanced
2 to 12 weeks
Circulation improves, less coughing and wheezing
Improvement in lung function begins
1 to 9 months
Cough, sinus congestion, fatigue and shortness of breath decrease
Phlegm production decreases
Cilia (tiny hair like structures) in the lung regain normal function
1 year
Risk of heart disease and heart attack reduced to half that of a smoker
5 to 15 years
Risk of stroke returns to that of a non-smoker
10 years
Risk of lung, mouth, throat, esophagus, bladder, kidney and pancreas cancer drops
15 years
Risk of heart disease and heart attack similar to risk of those who have never smoked

10 Smoking Facts That You Don’t Know

10. The legal age of tobacco purchasing is increased from 16 to 18 in many countries except in Japan, where the minimum age is 20 years for that.
9. Scientists say that smokers lose 14 years of their life due to smoking.
8. After smoke is inhaled, nicotine reaches the brain within 10 seconds and is found in every part of the body.
7. Urea that is a major component of urine is added to flavor the cigarettes.
6. Smokers normally smoke after having a meal; because they think that it allows food to digest easily but in fact the body’s priority moves to protecting blood cells other than digesting food.
5. Around 25% of the cigarettes are sold around the world are smuggled
4. Brands like Marlboro, Kool, Camel and Kent owns around 70% of the cigarette market.
3. U.S cigarette manufacturers earn a lot more in selling the cigarettes to countries all over the world than by selling to Americans.
2. Now with blended tobacco some toppings are mixed to add flavor like clove, licorice, orange oil, apricot stone, lime oil, lavender oil, cocoa and many other.
1. Cigarette is the only most traded item in the world. More than $400 billion is earned by the industries each year.

Children Smoking in Indonesia

Justin Bieber Smoking Weed!!!

Indonesian baby on 40 cigarettes a day

5 Weird Reasons Not to Smoke

Watch the graphic new anti-smoking TV advert showing tumour growing out of a cigarette

Smoking the Supply

source: www.mc.uky.edu
source: www.quitguide.com
source: www.tiptoptens.com

Interesting Facts About Transplantation

Transplantation is now a highly successful procedure, which is considered routine surgical practice for people with serious kidney, liver, heart or lung disease. Over the past 50 years, surgeons have made great strides in their ability to implant organs in people who are seriously ill. At least 21 different organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys and tissues such as corneas and bone marrow can now be successfully transplanted into patients who can then expect to survive for years or even decades. It is the treatment of choice for many diseases, but all too often a suitable organ is not available to meet the ever-increasing demand for transplantation.

TRANSPLANT REJECTION
For medical transplantation to be successful, physicians must elude the combative efforts of the bodys complex immune system, which fights to protect the body from infections of all sorts. Central to the functioning of the immune system is its ability to distinguish between invading or foreign matter, which should be attacked, and matter that is a normal part of the body, which should not be attacked. This recognition system causes the immune system to attack transplanted tissues because it has no way to distinguish between harmful and beneficial foreign matter.

Because of this rejection, the recipient must take drugs to suppress the immune response. The first drugs that were used were azathioprine and prednisone. But these drugs suppress the entire immune system, leaving the recipient vulnerable to infections and certain cancers. They also have toxic side effects. A major breakthrough in immune suppression was the development of cyclosporine, a natural product derived from a fungus found in the soil. Cyclosporine suppresses the part of the immune system involved in organ rejection with less severe impact on other parts of the immune system.

KIDNEY TRANSPLANTS
The diseases that most often create a need for kidney transplantation are glomerulonephritis (inflammation of the kidneys), diabetes, hypertension and cystic kidney failure. People with these diseases who have failing kidneys have to undergo regular treatment with an artificial kidney (haemodialysis). Kidney dialysis is the procedure in which blood is circulated through a machine that removes wastes and excess fluids from the bloodstream. The patient must be hooked up to the dialysis machine two to three times each week for as long as 12 hours at a time. Some patients use dialysis for a short time, while their kidneys recover from injury or disease. Others must use dialysis for their entire lives or until they undergo a kidney transplant. However, dialysis can only replace about 5% of the function of two healthy kidneys, and for many people their quality of life on dialysis is very poor. Additionally, life expectancy is lower for people on dialysis than for the normal population.

Kidney transplantation is the best treatment possible for kidney failure. Kidney transplants are also the most common of all transplant operations and have excellent success rates. It can improve quality of life dramatically and increase life expectancy.

One year after transplantation of a kidney from a brain-dead donor around 90% of transplants are still functioning well. After five years over 60% are still healthy and overcoming any need for dialysis. Some kidney transplant patients have survived more than 25 years.

Because people have two kidneys but need only one, a living relative often serves as a donor, retaining one kidney for his or her own use. About one-third of transplanted kidneys come from living relatives and about two-thirds are from someone who recently died.

LIVER TRANSPLANTS
For people with severe liver disease, transplantation can sometimes be the only effective treatment available. The most common diseases that cause a need for liver transplantation are cirrhosis, some types of chronic hepatitis, acute liver failure, or inflammation of the bile ducts that lead into the liver (primary sclerosing cholangitis).

The liver is the only internal organ with the capacity to regenerate. This capacity provides the surgeon additional flexibility in treating liver damage. For instance, if the damage is not very severe, a temporary transplant can take over the livers function while the patients own liver recovers. It is also possible to remove part of a liver from a living donor and transplant it. After the surgery both the donors liver and the transplanted portion will grow to full size.

Fortunately, waiting lists for liver transplants are shorter than for kidneys. At one year, around 80% of liver transplants are working well. This falls to 60 65% after five years.

HEART AND HEART / LUNG TRANSPLANTS
Heart transplants are perhaps the most dramatic of all organ transplants because without a functioning heart, a patient cannot survive more than a few minutes. On December 3, 1967, Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant, transferring the heart of a 25-year-old woman into the body of Louis Washkansky, a 55-year-old grocer, Washkansky died 18 days later. The second transplant, on January 2, 1968, was for Philip Blaiberg, who lived for 563 days after the operation. However, heart transplant surgery later became standard after the development of powerful drugs that prevented the bodys immune system from rejecting the transplant.

The most common cause of heart failure is coronary heart failure. The final stage in almost any type of heart disease is heart failure, also known as congestive heart failure, in which the heart muscle weakens and is unable to pump enough blood to the body. In response to this shortfall, the kidneys conserve water in an attempt to increase blood volume, and the heart is stimulated to pump harder. Eventually excess fluid seeps through the walls of tiny blood vessels and into the tissues. Fluid may collect in the lungs, making breathing difficult, especially when a patient is lying down at night. Many patients with heart failure must sleep propped up on pillows to be able to breathe. Fluid may also build up in the ankles, legs or abdomen. In the later stages of heart failure, any type of physical activity becomes next to impossible. Heart failure can sometimes be reversed and can often be effectively treated for long periods with a combination of drugs. A last resort in the treatment of heart failure is heart transplantation, in which a diseased heart is replaced with a healthy heart from a person who has died of other causes.

Heart transplantation is an effective option: Most patients are able to resume a normal life about six months after surgery and 85% of heart transplants are still working well after a year, and almost 70% after five years. However, because there is only a limited supply of donor hearts, many people who could potentially benefit from heart transplantation are not placed on the waiting list.

LUNG TRANSPLANTS
Increasingly, cystic fibrosis patients with severe, irreparable lung damage turn to lung transplantation surgery. Although complications with transplantation surgery may pose problems for some patients, lung or combination heart and lung transplants provide nearly 80% of cystic fibrosis patients with severe lung damage an entirely new lease on life.

In nearly 20% of all cases, the first symptom is intestinal blockage in newborns. In other babies, the first evidence is bulky stool, poor weight gain, flabby muscle tone, or slow growth, all products of low levels of digestive enzymes in the intestines. About half of all children with cystic fibrosis first see the doctor for coughing, wheezing, or respiratory tract infections. Teenagers with cystic fibrosis may grow slowly and enter puberty later than their peers. Cystic fibrosis often causes impaired reproductive function. Cystic fibrosis patients of all ages are prone to dehydration because they lose so much salt in their sweat. Infections, particularly in the lungs, plague people with cystic fibrosis throughout their lives. These chronic infections destroy lung tissue, a complication that ultimately takes the lives of most people with cystic fibrosis.

CORNEA TRANSPLANTS
Eye banks concentrate on retrieving tissues used in eye surgery that restores or improves sight. Most eye banks focus on retrieving corneas. The cornea is the clear front window of the eye, about the size and shape of a coin. It transmits light to the interior of the eye allowing us to see clearly. Corneal injury, disease or hereditary conditions can cause clouding, distortion and scarring that may result in blindness. But corneal blindness is one of the few forms of blindness that can be cured. In a delicate procedure, the surgeon removes the damaged cornea and replaces it with a cornea donated by a recently deceased person. Cornea transplants are very successful, with a success rate of more than 90% if the cornea is placed on the eye in such a manner that blood vessels do not come into contact with it. Without blood vessels, the body cannot send immune cells to attack the cornea.

SKIN
A burn is an injury to the skin caused when heat, chemicals, electricity, or radiation destroy tissue. Extensive burns, involving 30% or more of the bodys surface, can be life threatening because they disrupt the skins ability to fight infection, prevent fluid loss, and regulate body temperature. Deep burns are often treated with skin grafts. In this procedure, healthy skin removed from another area on the body is transferred to the burned area to cover the wound. If the burned area is not too large, the grafted skin will grow in its new location and eventually fuse with the healthy skin at the edges of the burn. But if burns cover a large portion of a patients body and not enough healthy skin remains to use for a graft, patients may receive grafts from dead bodies. Although the patients immune system eventually rejects and destroys this foreign tissue, these temporary skin grafts help prevent fluid loss and infection while the patients own skin heals.

Skin was the first tissue transplanted, and researchers used skin transplants in the late 1950s and early 1960s to decipher the immune system response to transplants.

BONE MARROW
Bone marrow is the living tissue found in the centre of many large bones of the body. Special cells on the bone marrow, called stem cells, are the source of both red blood cells, the primary component of blood, and white blood cells, the workhorses of the immune system. Certain blood diseases, including leukaemia and sickle cell anaemia, are the result of the stem cells in the bone marrow producing faulty blood cells. In some cases, these diseases can be treated by destroying all of the patients bone marrow and replacing it with new donor bone marrow that does not produce the faulty blood cells. Bone marrow transplants are also used in fighting breast cancers and other cancers because intensive radiation or chemotherapy used to cure the cancer also kills the patients bone marrow, which must then be replaced with a transplant.

Stem cell transplants require a closer matching of donor and recipient than is the case with other types of transplants. If the match is not good enough, the recipients body may reject the bone marrow or the white blood cells generated by the donor marrow can attack the recipients body, a phenomenon known as graft-versus-host disease. Formerly, stem cells could only be transplanted from the bone marrow of the donor, and the procedure was known as bone marrow transplantation. Recent advances now make it possible to recover stem cells from circulating blood, making the transplant procedure much simpler and less risky for the donor. A live donor is able to simply donate blood, from which the necessary cells and components are removed.

BONE
Bone is used for facial reconstruction of motor vehicle accident victims. Bone is also used in replacing cancerous growths in arms or legs of patients. In the past we used to have to amputate the limb.

Heart valves can also be replaced through transplantation. Pancreases can also be transplanted, although they are not done in South Africa. In America they have also started with small intestine transplants. Reliable survival data for intestine transplant patients are not yet available because the procedure is still experimental. Techniques are improving all the time and it may soon be practical to transplant other parts of the body.

ARTIFICIAL ORGANS AND TISSUES
One way to get around the shortage of donors is to use wholly or partially artificial organs made of plastic, metal, and other synthetic materials. A kidney dialysis machine, for example, is an artificial organ, even if it is too large to implant in the body. The first permanent artificial heart was transplanted in 1982, but the patient survived only for 112 days. Artificial hearts are not widely used today because of the risk of infection and bleeding and concerns about their reliability. In addition, the synthetic materials used to fashion artificial hearts can cause blood clots to form in the heart. These blood clots may travel to a vessel in the neck or head, resulting in a stroke. Instead, emphasis has shifted to the use of left-ventricular assist devices (LVADs), which are implanted beside a patients heart to help it pump blood. LVADs keep patients alive until a donor heart is available. Many artificial devices work to restore the operation of malfunctioning organs without replacing the whole organ. Examples include artificial heart valves and pacemakers to help the heart function properly, and cochlear implants to restore hearing.

XENOTRANSPLANTS
The shortage of donors has led some surgeons to consider using animals as donors. Chimpanzee kidneys were successfully transplanted in 1963, with one recipient living for nine months after the surgery. Although the kidneys were not rejected, they proved too small to keep the recipient alive. Efforts to transplant chimpanzee and baboon hearts into humans in the 1960s and 1970s also failed because the hearts were too small. The first successful baboon organ transplant occurred in 1984, when a baboon's heart was transplanted into a two-week-old premature baby whose heart was congenitally malformed. The baby survived for 20 days before her body rejected the organ. Because of problems with the small size of chimpanzee and baboon organs, doctors are now turning to other species as potential organ donors.

One animal receiving a lot of attention from the medical community is the pig. Pigs have organs that are the right size for human use, they have large litters, and they mature quickly so there is a ready supply of donating animals. Human bodies do not reject some pig tissues, such as heart valves. Surgeons in the United States transplant about 60,000 pig heart valves into humans annually. However, other transplanted pig organs undergo a phenomenon called hyperacute rejection. The recipient's immune system recognizes that the blood vessels in the transplanted organ are foreign and shuts off blood flow to the new organ within hours or even minutes, causing the transplanted organ to blacken and die. Recently, scientists have used genetic engineering techniques to breed pigs whose blood vessels contain the marker antigens found in human blood vessels. Livers from these pigs have been successfully connected to the bloodstream of several patients to clear toxic wastes while the patients' own livers recovered. Fetal pig brain cells have also been used to treat Parkinson disease, and research is underway on using other organs from these pigs.

One of the big drawbacks of xenotransplants is the fear that unknown, possibly deadly viruses could be transferred from animals to humans. Once the animal viruses get into humans, they might spread to other humans. In 1997, scientists showed that pig viruses could infect humans with unpredictable results. The unresolved questions surrounding xenotransplantation mean that future research must be done cautiously.

source: odf.org.za

Interesting Facts About Insulin

by Linda von Wartburg
The name insulin comes from the Latin insula, for islands. It refers to the pancreatic islets of Langerhans that contain the beta cells.

The Islets of Langerhans

The pancreas contains one to three million islets of Langerhans, but the islets account for only 2 percent of the total mass of the pancreas. The rest of the pancreas secretes a juice containing digestive enzymes that break down food. Within the islets of Langerhans, beta cells constitute 60 to 80 percent of all the cells.

A Once Elusive Hormone

Before Banting and Best, researchers couldn't find insulin because the digestive juices put out by the pancreas digested it all. Banting and Best's trick was to tie a string around the pancreatic duct of a live dog. When the dog was examined several weeks later, the pancreatic digestive cells had died and had been absorbed by the immune system, leaving the thousands of islets. They then isolated an extract from these islets, producing what they called isletin (insulin).

Detecting Insulin's Sequence

Insulin was the first protein ever to have its sequence determined. The exact sequence of amino acids comprising the insulin molecule was found by British molecular biologist Frederick Sanger, who was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1969, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin determined the spatial conformation of insulin, or how it's twisted in space.

What md/dl Stands for

The abbreviation mg/dl stands for milligrams of glucose in 100 milliliters (one deciliter) of blood. A milligram equals .0000353 of an ounce, and 100 milliliters equals something less than half a cup. In a healthy adult male of 165 pounds with a blood volume of about five quarts, a blood glucose level of 100 mg/dl corresponds to about 1/5 ounce of glucose in the blood and approximately 11/2 ounces in the total body water. All the glucose in your blood amounts to about the contents of a restaurant sugar packet.

All Creatures, Great and Small, Need It

Insulin is required for all animal life, and it works just about the same in nematode worms, fish and mammals like us. The initial sources of insulin for clinical use in humans were cow, horse, pig or fish pancreases. They all work because they're nearly identical to human insulin. Cow insulin differs from human by only three amino acids, and pig insulin by only one. Before human recombinant analogues were available, Novo Nordisk was able to convert pig insulin into human insulin by removing the single different amino acid and chemically adding the correct one.

Hard to Swallow

Unlike many medicines, insulin cannot be taken orally. Like nearly all other proteins, it is digested into useless fragments in the gastrointestinal tract.

Where Old Insulin Goes

What happens to your old insulin? Once an insulin molecule has docked onto the receptor and done its work, it may be released back into the extracellular environment or it may be degraded, usually by liver cells.

Zinc's Important Role

Unmodified human insulin tends to join up with zinc in the blood, forming hexamers, which means six monomers; that is, six single molecules of insulin stuck together. Insulin in the form of a hexamer will not bind to its receptors, so the hexamer has to slowly turn back into single monomers before it can work. That's why zinc combinations of insulin are used to make slow release basal insulin. Ultralente insulin (no longer available) was a good example of this use of zinc.

Insulin Analogs

Lilly had the first insulin analog with "lispro," a rapid acting insulin analog with the trade name of Humalog®. It's called lispro because they reversed the positions of lysine and proline in the insulin. This modification did not alter receptor binding, but blocked the formation of insulin dimers (two joined insulin molecules) and hexamers. This allowed larger amounts of active monomeric insulin to be available in the body.

Novo Nordisk created "aspart" and marketed it as NovoLog, a rapid acting insulin analogue. It's called aspart because they switched the normal proline amino acid for an aspartic acid residue. This analogue also prevents the formation of hexamers, to create a faster acting insulin.

Aventis developed glargine (Lantus) as a longer lasting insulin analogue. It was created by adding two arginines and switching another molecule for glycine.

Interesting Facts about Soaps

The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap

Ancient peoples are believed to have employed wood ashes and water for washing and to have relieved the resulting irritation with grease or oil.

Although soap was known in England in the 14th century., the first English patent to a soapmaker was issued in the 17th century.

The soap industry in England was handicapped from 1712 to 1853 by a heavy tax on soap.

Interesting Facts about Chinese Weight Loss Tea

Recently, another study concerning the weight loss benefits of the Chinese organic weight loss tea was conducted and the results of the research showed that people who drink certain type of tea have a better propensity for weight loss generally. Drinking Chinese weight loss green tea daily allows the organism to burn an additional 90 calories a day, something that weight loss fighters and enthusiasts would simply enjoy reaching.

Nowadays, Chinese weight loss tea or just green tea is widely available on the western market and it can easily be purchased in any weight loss products store, or even online. Buying these kinds of products on the internet is even easier and sometimes cheaper.

Buy Online Chinese Tea

It is well known that Chinese green tea can also prevent various forms of cancer. There is a form of cancer that starts in the blood-forming cells of the bone marrow. Afterwards, it invades the blood and can then spread to the lymph nodes, the spleen, liver, and other parts of the body.

On the other hand, other forms of cancer can appear in these organs and then spread to the bone marrow, but these are not known as leukemia. Chronic myeloid leukemia can also modify into a fast-growing acute leukemia that destroys almost any organ in the human body. Chinese experts in traditional medicine claim that those who drink green tea can prevent such types of cancer.

This is not all the available information about Chinese weight loss green tea. However, if you’ve picked something useful from this article, then by all means, don’t just stand there, act! You won’t really be able to gain any benefits just from your knowledge if you don’t practice and use it properly.

We do hope that reading the above article was both enjoyable and educational for most of you. The learning curve in life should be ongoing. The more you know, the more you will be able to share with others and help them. With that being said, please don’t waste your precious time and find out more about Chinese weight loss tea on our blog. We update it often and you can easily find a lot of rare tips and tricks there so don’t miss this opportunity. There is nothing better then affording yourself to be able to treat others and your family using natural ways and excluding all possible medications. God bless you!

Source: articledashboard.com

Interesting Facts About Food and Diet

The staple food of the Kanembu, a tribe living on the shores of Lake Chad in Africa, is Algae. The Kanembu harvest a common variety known as Spirulina from the lake, dry it on the sand, mix it up into a spicy cake, and eat it with tomatoes and chili peppers.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Consumption of green and yellow vegetables has decreased 6.3 pounds a year per person since the late 1940s. The use of cereal and flour products has dropped about 30 pounds a year per person, and Consumption of noncitrus fruits has declined at about the same rate. The only fruits whose rate of consumption has increased since World War I are citrus fruits.

The Bible mentions Salt more than thirty times.

Apples are more efficient than coffee at keeping people awake in the morning.

On average, a pound of potato Chips cost two hundred times more than a pound of potatoes.

Eighteen ounces of an average Cola drink contain as much caffeine as a cup of coffee.

Though most people think of Salt as a seasoning, only 5 out of every 100 pounds produced each year go to the dinner table The rest is used for such diverse purposes as packing meat, building roads, feeding livestock, tanning leather, and manufacturing glass, soap, ash, and washing compounds.

The nutritional value of squash and pumpkin Seeds improves with age. These Seeds are among the few foods that increase in nutritive value as they decompose. According to tests made at the Massachusetts Experimental Station, squash and pumpkin Seeds stored for more than five months show a marked increase in protein content.

On the average, each American Consumes 117 pounds of potatoes, 116 pounds of beef, 100 pounds of fresh vegetables, 80 pounds of fresh fruit, and 286 eggs per year.

Half the foods eaten throughout the world today were developed by Farmers in the Andes Mountains. Potatoes, maize, sweet potatoes, squash, all varieties of beans, peanuts, manioc, cashews, pineapples, chocolate, avocados, tomatoes, peppers, papayas, strawberries, mulberries, and many other foods were first grown in this region.

In ancient China and certain parts of India, Mouse flesh was considered a great delicacy. In ancient Greece, where the Mouse was sacred to Apollo, Mice were sometimes devoured by temple priests.

According to a report issued by the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, improved Nutrition would cut the national health bill by approximately one third. The committee also claims that a diet composed of 10 percent protein, 10 percent fat, and 80 percent complex carbohydrates (plus exercise done in moderation) could save 98 percent of those who die of heart disease every year.

Rennet, a common substance used to curdle milk and make cheese, is taken from the inner lining of the fourth stomach of a calf.

There are 15,000 different kinds of Rice.

Rice is the chief food for half the people of the world.

In the Middle Ages, chicken soup was believed to be an aphrodisiac.

After the "Popeye" comic strip started in 1931, spinach consumption went up by thirty-three percent in the United States.

Refined Sugar is the only food known that provides calories but no nutrition. About 100 pounds of Sugar are eaten per person each year in America, and only 36 percent of it is taken directly. The rest is "hidden" in commercially sweetened and prepared foods like ketchup, baby food, canned fruits, and cereals. Children, it is estimated, consume 3 to 4 pounds of refined Sugar a week.

Among many native tribes in South Africa, Termites are roasted to a nutlike consistency and eaten by the handful, like party snacks. It might also be noted that at certain specialty food shops in the United States and Europe, the connoisseur of exotic delicacies can purchase such treats as chocolate covered ants, candied bees, and pickled bull's scrotum.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans eat more than 22 pounds of Tomatoes every year. More than half this amount is eaten in the form of ketchup and Tomato sauce.

Everyone knows about Vitamins A, B, C, D, and E. Few are aware that there are also Vitamin K (promotes proper liver function and vitality), Vitamin T (helpful in treating anemia), Vitamin H (also called biotin), and Vitamin U (promotes healing of ulcers).

In ancient Rome it was considered a sin to eat the flesh of a Woodpecker.

source: ioframe.com