Eating Whole Grains Linked to Lower Rates of Heart Disease

Older adults who ate nearly three servings of whole-grain foods daily were significantly less likely to die from heart disease than those who ate fewer servings.

That's according to a study conducted by researchers at the ARS Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, Boston, Mass., and their colleagues, and published in the January 2006 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (volume 83, pages 124 to 131).

They based their findings on their 1981-1984 analysis of three-day food records and blood tests from 535 healthy male and female participants older than 60, and their 12- to 15-year follow-up to assess the causes of death among participants during those years.

When sorted into groups according to the amount of whole-grain foods they ate, those who ate the most—an average of about 2.9 servings a day—had significantly less risk of dying from heart disease than those in the group with the lowest intake. (Whether the participants changed their preference for whole grains during the follow-up period is not known.)

The scientists concluded that adults of all ages should increase the amount of whole grains they eat to three servings a day—the recommended level—or even more.

Today, most Americans eat less than one daily serving of a whole-grain food.

Source:
U.S. Department of Agriculture

Corn Breeding Methods

Since ancient times, farmers have chosen the best examples from each crop to provide seed for the next year. This method is called mass selection. Mass selection produces plants with similar genetic qualities over time.

A method called pure-line breeding is similar. But it is more systematic. In pure-line breeding, the best plants are chosen from a crop that has many different genetic qualities.

The seeds from these plants are grown. Then the best plants are chosen from the new crop. This process can go on for many years, until the seeds produce plants with measurable similarities and desirable qualities. Seed companies may use this method to produce seed for some crops.

But the pure-line method is not often used with widely traded crops. Today major crops like corn or wheat are developed as hybrids.

About one hundred years ago, a scientist in the United States, G.H. Shull, made important discoveries about corn hybrids.

He mated corn with itself. Corn does not normally fertilize itself in nature. If corn is inbred, the seeds will produce a plant that clearly shows the qualities of the parent. But this inbreeding does not produce a strong plant.

Shull found that if he mated two inbred corn plants, they would produce a strong line with the good qualities of the parent plants. This is called crossbreeding.

Researchers soon recognized that they could crossbreed four inbred lines of corn. This "double cross" results in stronger corn with the best qualities of the parent plants. This is the way most hybrid corn is developed.

Modern hybrid corn produces much more grain than its ancestors. But success can create its own problems. For example, there is very little genetic difference in the corn grown across the United States. Experts estimate that current hybrids use less than five percent of the genetic diversity that exists.

There is a project called Germplasm Enhancement of Maize, or GEM. It is a cooperative effort to increase the genetic diversity in corn. The project involves the Department of Agriculture, sixteen universities and twenty international companies.

Genetically Engineered Rice Varieties Cut Use of Pesticides

A study in China suggests that two kinds of genetically engineered rice can reduce the costs, and dangers, of using pesticides.

One kind of rice includes a gene found in the bacterium known as Bt. Bt lives in soil and on plants; it is a natural insecticide. It is poisonous to some kinds of insects. Bt maize is commonly planted in the United States. The other kind of rice was engineered to resist insects with a gene from the cowpea plant.

The two-year study involved tests of Bt rice in Hubei province and cowpea rice in Fujian. Scientists collected information from small farms already testing insect-resistant rice without technical aid. Some farmers are growing both insect-resistant and traditional rice.

The scientists found that the Bt rice produced six to nine percent more grain than other kinds of rice. The cowpea rice, based on fewer observations, did not appear to increase productivity.

Still, the findings show that resistance to insects improved for both kinds of rice. The study says farmers used eighty percent less insecticide than usual.

Science magazine published the findings. Jikun Huang led the study. He is director of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, in the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The study notes that no country has yet released a major food grain crop that has been genetically changed. Engineered crops are now used mostly for animal feed and products like cotton.

The Chinese farmers in the study made their own decisions about when to use insecticides. Those with traditional rice crops used chemicals almost four times per growing season on average. But farmers with the insect-resistant rice used insecticides an average of less than once per season.

Less insecticide meant fewer sick farmers. The study says the farmers growing insect-resistant rice did not report any health problems from the use of poisons.

China has not approved genetically engineered rice for market. But a report from Hubei last month said insect-resistant rice appears to have been sold illegally for the last two years. That report came from the environmental group Greenpeace, which oppose genetic engineering. China says it is investigating the Greenpeace report.

Some countries will not import genetically engineered foods. Not everyone is sure that such products are safe for people or the environment.

Source:
VOA News Service
Author: Mario Ritter
First published: May 9, 2005

Cereals, Grains, and Grasses

The following posts cover topics related to cereal crops, grains, grasses, and related plants.

• Corn Breeding Methods
• Genetically Engineered Rice Cuts Pesticide Use
• Scientists Complete a Genetic Map of Rice
• Ethanol Fuel Opens New Markets for Corn
• Scientists Study Feasibility of Switchgrass for Ethanol and Energy Production
• Switchgrass Fact Sheet
• The Quest for Perennial Grains
  

Scientists Complete a Genetic Map of Rice

Scientists now know a lot more about a grain that people have eaten for ten thousand years. Research teams around the world have completed a map of the genes of rice. Such a map is called a genome. The findings appeared last week in the magazine Nature.

The map represents 95% of the rice genome. And the information is considered 99.99% correct.

The aim is to speed up the improvement of rice. The scientists warn that the kinds of rice plants used now have reached the limit of their productivity. Yet world rice production must grow by an estimated thirty percent in the next twenty years to meet demand.

In their paper, the researchers say rice is an excellent choice for genetic mapping and engineering. Rice genes have only about three hundred ninety million chemical bases. That might sound like a lot. But other major food grains have thousands of millions.

The new map could better explain not just rice. Rice shares a common ancestor with other crops in the grass family. These include corn and wheat.

Also, rice shares more than 70% of its genes with Arabidopsis. This plant is in the mustard family. Its genome was completed in 2000.

Genes produce proteins which guide the building of organisms. Genes are placed along chromosomes. Rice has twelve chromosomes. The scientists found almost thirty-eight thousand genes. By comparison, studies have found only about twenty-five thousand genes in humans.

The International Rice Genome Sequencing Project in Tsukuba, Japan, led the research. The effort started in 1998.

The Rice Genome Research Program in Japan supervised the mapping of about half of the genome. American researchers were responsible for three chromosomes. Chinese and Taiwanese researchers mapped one each. A French group mapped one and part of another. Researchers in Brazil, Britain France, India, South Korea and Thailand also took part.

The project was expected to take ten years. But the work was finished in six because many of the groups shared information and technology. Two companies, Monsanto of the United States and Syngenta of Switzerland, also shared their research.

Source:
VOA News Service
Author: Mario Ritter
First published: August 15, 2005

Ethanol Fuel Opens New Markets for Corn

The American Midwest is known as the corn belt. Most of the nation’s maize is grown along that stretch of the country. The farmers who grow the corn have been very successful. So successful, they now face oversupply and low prices.

Most of the corn goes to feed animals. But some of it also goes into cars and trucks as ethanol fuel. Some farmers hope greater use of ethanol will drive new markets for corn.

Ethanol is made from plant matter that contains complex carbohydrates, or starch. Starch breaks down into simple sugars. And yeast organisms break down the sugars into alcohol.

Ethanol has a long history. It is ethyl alcohol, also called grain alcohol, the same kind found in alcoholic drinks.

Corn is not the only crop that can be used to make ethanol. Barley, wheat, even the leaves and stalks of corn, rice and sugar cane can be used.

In some parts of the country, fuel companies are required to add ethanol to gasoline as a way to reduce air pollution. The United States Department of Energy says many automobiles can run on ten percent ethanol without any need for changes.

The government has supported the development of vehicles with the ability to use a mixture called E-eighty-five. It is eighty-five percent ethanol and fifteen percent gasoline.

Some people may not even know that their cars and trucks have this ability. Many of these vehicles are common models made by Chrysler, Ford and General Motors.

A number of state laws support the use of ethanol. So does federal law. The Energy Policy Act of two thousand five requires the production of fifteen thousand million liters of renewable fuels this year. There are also tax reductions for ethanol makers, farmers and buyers of vehicles that can run on E-eighty-five.

Some experts, however, say they are concerned that using food crops to make fuel is bad policy. Some say it might use more energy than it produces. Others say using a lot of corn for fuel might shrink food supplies. But the process that separates starch to make ethanol, called wet milling, uses only part of the corn.

Plant-based fuels are not new. For many years Brazil has used fuel made with alcohol from sugar cane.

Related topic:
Scientists Study Switchgrass for Ethanol and Energy Production

Source:
VOA News Service
Author: Mario Ritter
First published: January 30, 2006

The Quest for Perennial Grains

Thirty-three years ago, as a California genetics professor, Wes Jackson got to thinking about the annual planting, harvesting and re-planting cycle of the American farm -- AND about erosion, insects, drought, and chemical runoff's terrible toll. Remembering the hardy prairie of his native Kansas, Mr. Jackson wondered whether food grains could be grown perennially -- just like the prairie's sturdy grasses. And he set off to find out.

Now in his late 60s, one of American agriculture's notable contrarians is more rumpled and thicker in the waist than he was as a Kansas farmboy, coasting through what he calls one of the most misspent youths in the history of the planet.

Not until college would Wes Jackson take much besides football and girlfriends seriously. But his parents' aphorisms about thrift, discipline, restraint, and respect for the land slowly meshed with his own intellectual curiosity and with students' demands that science improve daily life.

"Students were screamin' for relevance at that time," Mr. Jackson says. "So, I clipped and tore and Xeroxed timely articles, and then began to see that the population problem is a serious problem. Resource depletion and environmental destruction were all a part of one fabric."

So in 1976 this brilliant and widely published geneticist returned to his roots, literally, and founded a combination farm and think tank called the Land Institute, outside the central Kansas city of Salina. Mr. Jackson still runs the operation from a tiny cabin next to what he calls the Sunshine farm, a 60-hectare labyrinth of test fields. In bluejeans and workshirt, he reclines in a squeaky chair with his feet propped up on his desk next to disheveled piles of papers -- a pot-bellied stove keeping the flatland chill at bay. In ways befitting an intellectual luminary -- for Mr. Jackson was awarded the prestigious, $250,000 MacArthur genius grant -- he takes the conversation in a hundred directions, not all of which the uninitiated listener can follow. For instance he's been known to say, "What we will be doing is developing elegant solutions predicated on the uniqueness of place."

The 24-person Land Institute staff now includes several other doctors of agronomy and ecology who are Jackson disciples. Their goal is to develop what they call sustainable agriculture based on deep-rooted perennial crops that mimic a prairie by fertilizing themselves, resisting insects and weeds, and popping out of the ground year after year. Mr. Jackson points to a number of plots where the scientists have succeeded in growing mixtures of wheat, sorghum, soybeans, and corn.

An ecological mosaic takes time, a LONG time. "But," reflects Mr. Jackson, "if you're workin' on something that you can finish in your lifetime, you're not thinkin' big enough!" And he laughs uproariously.

The institute's biggest hurdle, Mr. Jackson says, will be crossing swords with what he calls the corporate culture that makes billions of dollars selling farmers pesticides, fertilizers, and the machinery needed to perpetuate the annual crop cycle.

Wes Jackson predicts there will be powerful interests aligned against any switch from what he calls wasteful, harmful, profitable annual farming. "Oh," he says with a wink, "I think some people in ag schools think I'm a nut -- maybe the majority."

Farmers will become true believers in sustainable agriculture, Wes Jackson says, once crop yields approach those of single-crop, monoculture farming. "They won't be skeptical if they can make a profit. If they can cut their input costs," he says. "Farmers aren't stupid. They just want to make a profit. So I'm not worried. If the compelling alternative is there, they'll go for it."

Wes Jackson says he'd love to ease off a bit -- do some more writing. But, as he puts it, "What I'm doin's awfully interesting work." How about travel, a little fun? "I don't really go on vacations," he says. "I travel a lot. But my place -- this place right here -- to me is where the action is."

But don't call Wes Jackson a futurist. "Too heroic," he says. "We're just trying to make sense of the world."

Source:
VOA News Service
Author: Ted Landphair
First published: April 17, 2006