SciScoop's Food Security blogger Ioannis Zabetakis takes a look at recent controversy surrounding glyphosate (Roundup) In the 1990s, I was studying and then teaching in the University of Leeds and those years were full of the "mad cow disease" scandal and the (still) ongoing debate on GM foods. Both the scientific community and society at large now know that by pressing the land or the animals to produce more, we are causing many undesired side effects and creating, possibly unnecessary, risks to the food chain. The 2005 ... Read on...

A new guest post on food security from Ioannis Zabetakis, Assistant Professor of Food Chemistry, Lab. of Food Chemistry, Dept. of Chemistry, Univ. of Athens, Athens, Greece. Zabetakis also blogs here. In order to evaluate the functionality of food components or chemical compounds against the development of Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs), we need to study the mechanism of how these compounds can inhibit or delay the onset of CVDs. It is widely accepted today that inflammation is linked to CVDs and the key trigger molecule there is the so called ... Read on...

"Do you remember the 'tipping point' (i.e. the temperature rise that would cause irreversible effects on Earth)?" asks guest blogger Ioannis Zabetakis of the University of Athens. Scientists had suggested few years ago that this tipping point would be a rise of 2 oC on the average temperature of our planet. Since then, a lot of research has been carried out along with some “sexing up” of data (Sexing up climate data). The questions though about the strength of the data that have been used in order to ... Read on...