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Healthy Minnesota Food

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Healthy Minnesota Food

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Profile of Barth Anderson who purchases produce from local farmers for The Wedge Food Coop in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Minnesota is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. The twelfth largest state by area in the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with just over five million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state on May 11, 1858. Known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”, the state’s name comes from a Dakota word for “sky-tinted water”. Those waters, together with forests, parks, and wilderness areas, offer residents and tourists a variety of outdoor recreational opportunities.

Etymology

The word Minnesota comes from the Dakota name for the Minnesota River: Mnisota. The root Mni (also spelled mini or minne) means, “water”. Mnisota can be translated as sky-tinted water or somewhat clouded water. Native Americans demonstrated the name to early settlers by dropping milk into water and calling it mnisota. Many locations in the state have similar names, such as Minnehaha Falls (“waterfall”), Minneiska (“white water”), Minnetonka (“big water”), Minnetrista (“crooked water”), and Minneapolis, which is a combination of mni and polis, the Greek word for “city”

Health

The people of Minnesota have a high rate of participation in outdoor activities; the state is ranked first in the percentage of residents who engage in regular exercise Minnesotans have the nation’s lowest premature death rate, third-lowest infant mortality rate, and the second-longest life expectancies. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 91% of Minnesotans have health insurance, more than in any other state. These and other measures have led two groups to rank Minnesota as the fourth-healthiest state in the nation.

On October 1, 2007 Minnesota became the seventeenth state to enact a statewide smoking ban in restaurants and bars with the enactment of Freedom to Breathe Act.

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Human Bodies Make Their Own Morphine

A laboratory morphine vial from the 1880s.

Our bodies produce a small but steady amount of natural morphine, a new study suggests.

Traces of the chemical are often found in mouse and human urine, leading scientists to wonder whether the drug is being made naturally or being delivered by something the subjects consumed.

The new research shows that mice produce the “incredible painkiller”—and that humans and other mammals possess the same chemical road map for making it, said study co-author Meinhart Zenk, who studies plant-based pharmaceuticals at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

In the study, researchers injected mice with an extra dose of a natural brain chemical called tetrahydropapaveroline (THP), which humans and mice are known to produce.

Using a tool called a mass spectrometer to analyze the mouse urine, the team was able to tell that THP underwent chemical changes in the body that created morphine, according to the study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

What’s more, the study found that mouse morphine is produced in nearly the same way as the morphine in poppies—the only morphine-making plants known to science.

Morphine a Defense Mechanism?

But “the big question is, What is it for?” Zenk said of the mammal-made morphine.

THP must undergo a complicated, 17-step process in the body to create morphine. Even so, the chemical has evolved twice—in poppies and in mammals—suggesting it’s somehow valuable for survival.

In the well-studied poppy plant, scientists suspect morphine acts as a defense against predators. For instance, a rabbit eating—and thus killing—a morphine-laced poppy may become sluggish, making itself easy prey for a passing hawk.

Likewise, Zenk noted, if an animal attacks a person, even background levels of morphine may block out enough pain to allow the person to escape. (Explore the human body.)

For now, however, this is “absolute speculation,” Zenk said. Next he plans to test the urine of people who have endured horrible pain—such as traffic-accident victims—to see if their bodies spiked morphine levels.

It’s also difficult to say whether the discovery will yield any new treatments, Zenk added. (Related: “Toxic Snail Venoms Yielding New Painkillers, Drugs.”)

But it’s possible that scientists could someday induce a person’s body to create a natural jolt of morphine that might prove less damaging than injecting the substance into the body. Morphine shots can carry many side effects, he said—especially constipation.

Vitamins and Supplements

vitamins

Vitamins and Supplements

A vitamin is an organic compound required as a nutrient in tiny amounts by an organism. A compound is called a vitamin when it cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by an organism, and must be obtained from the diet. Thus, the term is conditional both on the circumstances and the particular organism. For example, ascorbic acid functions as vitamin C for some animals but not others, and vitamins D and K are required in the human diet only in certain circumstances. The term vitamin does not include other essential nutrients such as dietary minerals, essential fatty acids, or essential amino acids, nor does it encompass the large number of other nutrients that promote health but are otherwise required less often.

Vitamins are classified by their biological and chemical activity, not their structure. Thus, each “vitamin” may refer to several vitamer compounds that all show the biological activity associated with a particular vitamin. Such a set of chemicals are grouped under an alphabetized vitamin “generic descriptor” title, such as “vitamin A,” which includes the compounds retinal, retinol, and many carotenoids. Vitamers are often inter-converted in the body.

History

The value of eating a certain food to maintain health was recognized long before vitamins were identified. The ancient Egyptians knew that feeding liver to a patient would help cure night blindness, an illness now known to be caused by a vitamin A deficiency.The advancement of ocean voyage during the Renaissance resulted in prolonged periods without access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and made illnesses from vitamin deficiency common among ships’ crews.

In 1749, the Scottish surgeon James Lind discovered that citrus foods helped prevent scurvy, a particularly deadly disease in which collagen is not properly formed, causing poor wound healing, bleeding of the gums, severe pain, and death. In 1753, Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy, which recommended using lemons and limes to avoid scurvy, which was adopted by the British Royal Navy. This led to the nickname Limey for sailors of that organization. Lind’s discovery, however, was not widely accepted by individuals in the Royal Navy’s Arctic expeditions in the 19th century, where it was widely believed that scurvy could be prevented by practicing good hygiene, regular exercise, and by maintaining the morale of the crew while on board, rather than by a diet of fresh food. As a result, Arctic expeditions continued to be plagued by scurvy and other deficiency diseases. In the early 20th century, when Robert Falcon Scott made his two expeditions to the Antarctic, the prevailing medical theory was that scurvy was caused by “tainted” canned food.

Vitamins are essential for the normal growth and development of a multicellular organism. Using the genetic blueprint inherited from its parents, a fetus begins to develop, at the moment of conception, from the nutrients it absorbs. It requires certain vitamins and minerals to be present at certain times. These nutrients facilitate the chemical reactions that produce among other things, skin, bone, and muscle. If there is serious deficiency in one or more of these nutrients, a child may develop a deficiency disease. Even minor deficiencies may cause permanent damage.

In nutrition and diseases

For the most part, vitamins are obtained with food, but a few are obtained by other means. For example, microorganisms in the intestine—commonly known as “gut flora”—produce vitamin K and biotin, while one form of vitamin D is synthesized in the skin with the help of the natural ultraviolet wavelength of sunlight. Humans can produce some vitamins from precursors they consume. Examples include vitamin A, produced from beta carotene, and niacin, from the amino acid tryptophan.

Once growth and development are completed, vitamins remain essential nutrients for the healthy maintenance of the cells, tissues, and organs that make up a multicellular organism; they also enable a multicellular life form to efficiently use chemical energy provided by food it eats, and to help process the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats required for respiration.

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