London, March 30 (IANS) Want to drink a tasty fruit juice which is low in sugar and high in fibre? Here is the answer to your prayers. A new cocktail consisting of lime, stevia and beta-glucans can be added to fruit juice to increase its nutritional value and promote the sensory experience, researchers report.
To satisfy the desire for something sweet while limiting our consumption of sugar, a natural sweetener called stevia is now being used.
“From a health point of view, the effects of using stevia have been purely positive,” said Line Holler Mielby from Aarhus University in Denmark.
Fibre products that have a positive effect on health include beta-glucans which are naturally occurring in oats, for example.
“Foods should have satisfying sensory characteristics since these characteristics will determine whether the consumer will buy the product again. The product should leave a good all-round impression,” Mielby added.
Fruit juice contains a number of beneficial vitamins but often has high sugar and low-fibre contents.
The challenge was to increase the nutritional value of the juice without spoiling the taste.
A team of scientists devised a solution to the problem of combining sweetness with healthiness by adding stevia for sweetness and beta-glucans for fibre with a dash of lime to adjust the taste.
Adding healthy fibre and low-calorie sweeteners to food will not work if they have a negative effect on the flavour.
In the study, they used an apple-cherry juice to which varying quantities of lime, beta-glucans and stevia were added. The aim was to characterise the sensory experience of the juice.
The results showed that the addition of lime to the apple-cherry juice could counterbalance the adverse impact on taste of the stevia and beta-glucans.
The taste of lime in the juice concealed not only the aftertaste of stevia but also the smell of staleness and metals imparted by the beta-glucans and improved the experience of drinking fruit juice containing beta-glucans.
Sex suffers when man demands perfection from partner
London, March 30 (IANS) Here’s a lesson for men who want perfectionism in everything — even in the bedroom! Researchers have found that setting exceedingly high standards of performance between the sheets may put your sex life in jeopardy by causing sexual dysfunction in your female partner.
Partner-prescribed sexual perfectionism can lead to decrease in female sexual function regarding arousal, showed the findings published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour.
The study led by professor Joachim Stoeber from the University of Kent in Britain also found that partner-prescribed sexual perfectionism contributed to negative self-image.
Perfectionism is defined as a “striving for flawlessness and the setting of exceedingly high standards for performance, accompanied by tendencies for overly critical self-evaluations and concerns about negative evaluations by others”.
It is a common personality characteristic that may affect all domains of life. However, the longer term consequences of how it affects people’s sex life had previously not been explored.
The research considered the response of 366 young women who completed two surveys in the period December 2013 to February 2014.
Those recruited to the study were told that the online survey was investigating whether “personal and interpersonal expectations and beliefs affect one’s sexuality and sexual function”.
Researchers differentiated between four forms of sexual perfectionism — self-oriented, partner-oriented, partner-prescribed and socially prescribed.
They found that partner-prescribed sexual perfectionism contributed to woman’s negative sexual self-concept and female sexual dysfunction.
They further found that partner-prescribed sexual perfectionism predicted decreases in sexual esteem and increases in sexual anxiety, suggesting that it is a psychological factor that may contribute to sexual problems in woman.