Flavonoids
oracknows | July 29, 2013You might find this hard to believe, but sometimes I find the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism to be useful. Obviously, I don't find it useful in the same way that its editors think it is useful. Those paragons of the arrogance of ignorance and fetishism of hatred of science-based medicine don't actually teach me anything about vaccines and autism. The torrents of pseudoscience, quackery, conspiracy mongering, and hostility do, however, serve their purpose. They keep my finger on the pulse of the "autism biomed" movement and what the latest "autism biomed" quackery du jour is. It looks…
cwilcox | October 26, 2008One way to get people 'eating healthy' is to make food healthier - and that is exactly what european researchers have done by genetically modifying a tomato (published in Nature Biotechnology). They inserted two snapdragon genes, allowing the fruit to over-express anthocyanins, which have beneficial effects against a host of human diseases, including cancer. Of course, there was one side effect: anthocyanins are pigment molecules, so the tomatoes turned purple.
Anthocyanins are a kind of flavonoid, a group of chemicals most commonly known for their antioxidant activity. Anthocyanins from…