Ice cream treats cancer! Maybe!

I just came across this old article from a March issue of The Scientist.  The writer Katherine Bagley describes an effort by scientists to isolate milk proteins that can help patients recovering from chemotherapy and insert them directly into...strawberry ice cream.  Yes.

She writes:

"One protein in particular, lactoferrin, has been shown to inhibit tumor growth, promote intestinal cell growth, and regulate immune response in the intestine (Biochem Cell Biol, 89:95–102, 2002). The scientists reasoned it could therefore help patients receiving chemotherapy, which can damage normal cells that multiply quickly, such as infection-fighting white blood cells, known as neutrophils, and intestinal cells."

One of the doctors involved explains why ice cream was the most suitable delivery mechanism for lactoferrin:

"Palmano considered incorporating the bioactives into a liquid drink or yogurt, but in the end, ice cream won out. “Creating a frozen product meant we didn’t have to worry about the bioactives’ shelf life,” she says. “Plus, people going through chemotherapy typically lose their appetite. Why not give them a treat like ice cream?""

While it's not yet on the market, it is being tested by patients who are "required" to eat ice cream every day:

"The scientists worked with New Zealand’s top ice cream manufacturers to create six tons of strawberry-flavored ReCharge. They then made a placebo ice cream with the same taste, color, and calorie count. ReCharge started its Phase II clinical trial in October 2009, in which 200 prechemotherapy cancer patients will be required to eat 100 grams of either ReCharge or the placebo ice cream each day.
“It has been a wonderful ride creating this product,” says Geursen. “We don’t know if ReCharge will work—it is always a challenge going from mice to humans—but we are keeping our fingers crossed.”"

I just raised the question in a previous post about anti-aging ice cream, why not deliver vitamins via ice cream?  This is an entirely feasible and worthy undertaking.   Maybe I should petition Solgar and Grom to do a collaboration. 


Read more: Sweet relief - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/3/1/24/1/#ixzz10RtLlYQn

Proustian moments #2, from Mona

This memory comes from one of my top food-nerd friends (and one of my favorite people on this green earth), Mona.  She is also on assignment as my new Asia correspondent.  You can read about her food adventures in China thus far (and I highly recommend you do) here.  And without further ado, I present Mona's ice cream memory:

I'll never ever ever forget the first time I had strawberry ice cream. It was (simply put) a glorious moment in life.

Now, I'm talking here about REAL strawberry ice cream with REAL strawberries chopped up and mixed in. Not that oddly bright pink junk you see in the supermarket freezer section.

So there I was at the awkward age of fourteen, hanging out on the beach in Del Mar, spending a lazy afternoon on a big blue towel, thinking about the usual things most silly young teenage girls might obsess/ponder over in this same situation. You know: cute boys, sand stuck in between my toes, cute boys, whether I should put on more sunscreen, etc. I think the combination of salty air and summer heat must have made me especially thirsty because what I remember is eagerly running to the parking lot to buy a bottle of water from the little snack cart. (Of course at that point I didn't suspect that I was about to taste something sublime.)

What Mona was thinking about before she learned about strawberry ice cream

The black pavement was burning the soles of my sandy feet and I realized water wasn't gonna do it for me. There was a lady selling homemade ice cream at the snack shop and so I scoped out her offerings. I don't even remember why, but I picked the strawberry, knowing well that my favorites were cookies n' cream and peanutbutter-chocolate. I remember my first taste, and my regret that I was already fourteen and had never discovered this yummy combination of sweet, icy, milky strawberry goodness before. Perhaps needless to say, since then my all time favorite flavor is (real) strawberry ice cream, no matter the season. This is coming from a serious chocoholic.

Now look at her!

Proustian moments #1, from Olivia Snaije

The first installment in a series of ice cream recollections.  This one comes from my friend Olivia, a writer in Paris.  When I first sent her this blog, she immediately shared this:

Cioccolato con panna is one of my favorites

I grew up in Rome, not the chic new pedestrian Rome, but the old Rome with cars and motorcycles zipping all over. Besides a few dreary months during the winter, it seemed to me as if every day after school, I would link arms with my best friend Sandra and go for a stroll. It was a given that we would stop and buy a gelato. We both, unfailingly, chose the same flavors every day: fragola, limone e panna, panna being the home-made whipped cream they put on ice cream. I lived near the Campo de' Fiori and she lived in Piazza Farnese so our perimeter was very small. We would usually go to a gelateria on Via dei Baulari; once in a while we might cross over the border that was Corso Vittorio Emanuele and buy an ice-cream near Piazza Navona. As Sandra recently confirmed to me in an email: "we adored fragola-limone."



Thank you, Olivia!  I'll be sharing mine soon, and would love to hear more from everyone else.