The Chemistry of Diet: Medicine,Nutrition, and Staple Foods in Imperial Brazil

Brazilian cuisine is much admired by present-day international chefs. However, in the nineteenth century, local ingredients and recipes were looked down upon by the Portuguese colonists, as well as by visiting European naturalists. This fact, together with medical and chemical views formulated throughout the 1800s, led locally trained doctors to attribute the occurrence of countless diseases that devastated Rio de Janeiro to local staple foods, particularly corn and manioc flour. In the first part of the present article, I review the dietary habits of Brazilians through the eyes of European naturalists who travelled across the country in the early nineteenth century. In the second part, I summarise the ideas formulated by French and German chemists on the components, and consequent nutritional value, of cereals and other sources of flour, and then analyse the appropriation of such ideas—particularly those of Justus Liebig—by Brazilian doctors and their adaptation to local conditions.     

Nonvisual Opsins and the Regulation of Peripheral Clocks by Light and Hormones

The molecular clock machinery is conserved throughout evolution. However, how environmental cues are perceived has evolved in such a way that peripheral clocks in mammals require a variety of signals, including hormones. On the other hand, in nonmammalian cells able to directly detect light, light seems to play a major role in the synchronization of the clock. The interaction between perception of circadian light by nonvisual opsins and hormones will be discussed under the perspective of clock synchronization at the molecular level.     

Preparation and characterization of microcapsules loaded with polyphenols-enriched Uncaria tomentosa extract using spray-dryer technique

Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry - This work prepared and characterized microcapsule of Uncaria tomentosa (UT) in order to standardize a spray-dryer Uncaria tomentosa extract. The UT...     

Pyrolysis of the hybrid energy cane: thermal decomposition and kinetic modeling using non-isothermal thermogravimetric analysis

Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry - This work aims to investigate the thermal decomposition and reaction kinetics of the hybrid energy cane, as well as its thermochemical properties....