SciCombinator

To explore whether improvements in psychological well-being occur after increases in fruit and vegetable consumption.

This study presents a novel way of enhancing plant growth through the use of a non-petroleum based product. We report here that exposing either roots or seeds of multicellular plants to extremely low concentrations of dissolved hydrogen sulfide at any stage of life causes statistically significant increases in biomass including higher fruit yield. Individual cells in treated plants were smaller (∼13%) than those of controls. Germination success and seedling size increased in, bean, corn, wheat, and pea seeds while time to germination decreases. These findings indicated an important role of H2S as a signaling molecule that can increase the growth rate of all species yet tested. The increased crop yields reported here has the potential to effect the world’s agricultural output.

In complex and ever-changing environments, resources such as food are often scarce and unevenly distributed in space and time. Therefore, utilizing external cues to locate and remember high-quality sources allows more efficient foraging, thus increasing chances for survival. Associations between environmental cues and food are readily formed because of the tangible benefits they confer. While examples of the key role they play in shaping foraging behaviours are widespread in the animal world, the possibility that plants are also able to acquire learned associations to guide their foraging behaviour has never been demonstrated. Here we show that this type of learning occurs in the garden pea, Pisum sativum. By using a Y-maze task, we show that the position of a neutral cue, predicting the location of a light source, affected the direction of plant growth. This learned behaviour prevailed over innate phototropism. Notably, learning was successful only when it occurred during the subjective day, suggesting that behavioural performance is regulated by metabolic demands. Our results show that associative learning is an essential component of plant behaviour. We conclude that associative learning represents a universal adaptive mechanism shared by both animals and plants.

Most children do not meet daily recommendations for fruit and vegetable intake, and consumption of vegetables remains especially low. Eating habits track from childhood to adulthood hence establishing liking and intake of vegetables is important.

Is consumption of fruits and vegetables with high levels of pesticide residues associated with lower semen quality?

Consumption of pulse crops, including field pea, is considered effective for a healthy diet. Hulls (seed coats) play an important role for protection of the cotyledon and embryo, but also as mediating positive effects on health outcomes. The biochemical attributes of field pea hulls were thus assessed to determine the occurrence of specific phytochemicals and their genotypic variability.

Direct-to-consumer marketing efforts, such as community-supported agriculture (CSA), have been proposed as a solution for disparities in fruit and vegetable consumption. Evaluations of such efforts have been limited. The objective of this study was to test the feasibility of a CSA intervention to increase household inventory of fruits and vegetables and fruit and vegetable consumption of residents of an underresourced community.

Different legume seeds may have different protein compositions and properties, thereby affecting applications in food systems. This study aimed to extract and characterize protein isolates from legumes grown in Thailand, including mung bean (MBPI), black bean (BBPI) and bambara groundnut (BGPI).

The acceptability of frozen green peas depends on their sensory quality. There is a need to relate physico-chemical parameters to sensory quality. In this research, six brands of frozen green peas representing product sold for retail and caterer’s markets were purchased and subjected to descriptive sensory evaluation and physico-chemical analyses (including dry matter content, alcohol insoluble solids content, starch content, °Brix, residual peroxidase activity, size sorting, hardness using texture analysis and colour measurements) to assess and explain product quality.

Divergent wild and endemic peas differ in hybrid sterility in reciprocal crosses with cultivated pea depending on alleles of a nuclear ‘speciation gene’ involved in nuclear-cytoplasmic compatibility.