United States: In a recent challenge to the FDA, the large US bakery has been asked to stop mislabeling its products with sesame, a known allergy trigger, when it is absent.

Details of the Situation

Bimbo Bakeries USA, known for brands like Sara Lee, Entenmann’s, and Ball Park, is disregarding an FDA warning from June that flagged several of its products as ‘misbranded’ due to the misleading sesame and tree nut labels.

In their response, Bimbo officials stated they would not change their sesame labeling practices. They explained that their production plants create both sesame-containing and non-sesame products, leading to their decision to label all items consistently to prevent potential allergic reactions.

In a July 1 letter shared with the Center for Science, the company claimed, “We believe our approach is the most protective of sesame-allergic consumers,” according to AP News.

Further Statements from Officials

Bimbo representatives reiterated this stance in an email, describing their labeling strategy as a “conservative approach” for consistent branding across nationally distributed products.

The FDA has yet to comment publicly, indicating they will handle the matter directly with the company. The agency retains the authority to initiate legal actions, including product recalls and penalties against companies that ignore their warnings.

Food safety advocates, including CSPI, express concerns over the ongoing standoff, highlighting confusion for over 33 million consumers with food allergies and limited options for more than 1.6 million individuals with sesame allergies.

Sung Poblete, CEO of the nonprofit group FARE (Food Allergy Research & Education), emphasized the necessity of precise food labeling for consumer safety, stating, “We depend on accurate labeling to make informed food choices.”

This conflict arises from a 2023 federal law mandating that any food sold in the US must be labeled if it contains sesame.

United States: Researchers have developed a suture that when subjected to tension – like in a moving patient – causes electrical stimulation of the wound.

More about the news

According to Dr. Chengyi Hou, who is a co-author of the research from Donghua University, “This electrical stimulation suture is a fully biodegradable and self-electrified material. It helps wound healing without any additional approaches, [such as] using external electric devices.” the Guardian reported.

They found that electrical stimulation enhances wound healing in various ways, such as by stimulating the migration of cells toward the affected region.

The team described in the journal Nature Communications that the new sutures have a magnesium core filament, which is then coated with biodegradable polymer.

More details of the study

This is accommodated within a casing that is also made out of another biodegradable material.

The team proceeded to experiment with the suture using artificial muscle fibers and rats with open injuries.

The conclusions derived from the study are as follows: when the sutures are stretched, and the core moves within the sheath, tightly packed elements are shoved against one another, and the process generates sparks, similar to when the balloon is rubbed on hair, for instance.

Hou said, “The suture generates electricity by creating opposite charges on the suture’s middle and outer shell when muscles relax and contract, based on the triboelectric effect,” the Guardian reported.

“This generates an electric field at the wound site to accelerate wound healing,” he added.

Whereas it might put stress and reduce how well the conventional stitches perform, it is good for the new sutures.

Using petri dish culture, the team used the percentage rate at which cells migrated into the subsequent layer around the sutures and the rate of cell divisions as electrical stimulation of nodes enhanced cell migratory rates and proliferation higher than when the field was not applied, and that it retarded bacterial growth.

The researchers also conducted some surgeries in rats and saw that muscles incised in the rats and sutured with the new sutures healed faster and had less bacterial quantity than those sutured with usual bioabsorbable sutures, something the researchers note can help reduce post-surgery infection risks.

After ten days, the wound was nearly fully recovered – although it was less than the result when no suture or any type of bioabsorbable suture was employed.

He noted that the team is also using the suture on human beings to conduct clinical trials about the suture; the new type of suture has the same cost as the commercial absorbable sutures.

United States: Only recently has a new light been shed on the analysis of the neurological differences between different kinds of insomnia published in Biological Psychiatry.

More about the news

The research found that structural brain connectivity — how different parts of the brain are connected – is different in all four of the five insomnia subtypes.

These findings may be the impetus for more focused treatments for people with insomnia and, eventually, for targeted therapies that can be personalized for a person’s brain anatomy.

About 10 percent of adult Europeans suffer from insomnia and comprise a large proportion of the population.

Sleep is worse if people have insomnia, which is trouble sleeping and waking up too early, which interferes with everyday life.

Insomnia and beyond

Beyond the immediate pang of discomfort, insomnia is linked to increased risk of other health conditions, including cardiovascular and heart disease, obesity, and mental health disorders like depression and anxiety.

Insomnia is commonly treated with cognitive behavioral therapy, but this doesn’t necessarily help most people, even in combination with medication.

Scientists believe that a better understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying insomnia would help improve treatment outcomes.

However, previous neuroimaging has shown some clues offering that loss of sleep is related to the disturbance of high-level brain networks like the default mode network and the salience network.

Despite that, findings have thus far been inconsistent. The reason might be that there is considerable variation among individuals with insomnia – a disorder that may not have one cause or cure for all.

In the recent past, researchers identified five different insomnia subtypes, each of which has its own profile of distress levels and personality traits.

However, unlike the sleep patterns alone, those subtypes were identified through a data-driven approach, making the classification more robust. In the current study, we sought to determine whether these subtypes also differ in brain structure.

What more are the experts suggesting?

According to Eus van Someren, the study author and a professor at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, “When we started to think about subtypes years ago, we considered that different combinations of minor deviations (towards the sides of the normal distribution) in brain circuits could have a final common path of a brain vulnerable to insomnia,” psypost.org reported.

“At that time, no big database with MRI data on people with insomnia was available. Therefore, we tried to assess proxy measures for individual differences in brain circuits,” Someren continued.

Moreover, “We selected a large number of life history, mood, and personality trait questionnaires that had been associated with individual differences in brain circuits. We implemented them on our website ‘slaapregister.nl’ for volunteers to fill out. Thousands of people completed the long list of questionnaires. We used data-driven clustering approaches to find specific profiles of scores on the questionnaires within the people that suffered from insomnia.”