TKF Science Writing

I was recently interviewed by a gal running a website called specialty buzz about freelance science writing. It will go live on her website (http://blog.jennescalona.com/category/specialtybuzz/) July 17th but for a sneak peak see below:

What is your specialty and how did you get started in that particular area?

I specialize in science and medical writing. Although I am adept with many science industries, my passions are food science, chemistry, and health.

What are three things a writer needs to know before choosing to specialize in your area of specialty?

I think you really should know the subject fairly well or be interested in it to study it a bit. Quite frankly, if you don’t really want to know why beans make you toot, then writing about it might make you look silly. Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Know or learn the lingo.

Don’t be too specialized as to completely pigeonhole yourself into one market.

Does writing in your specialty require any particular training or could a layman pick it up?

I think that depends on who your audience is. If you are writing for astro-physicists then you may want to take a course in physics.

Are there any potential pitfalls associated with specializing in your area?

There are pitfalls in any area in this economy. Who would have thought there would be pitfalls working for GM? Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

What is the current market for writing in your specialty? Who is buying and who is selling?

That is in a state of flux right now. Companies, websites, agencies are all cutting back right now. If you can weather the storm, pick up a few new skills, and plant some seeds, you might be okay.

What do you enjoy most about your specialty?

I love to cook and I enjoy chemistry and biology so it makes writing about it that much easier and fulfilling. Sometimes I feel like a teacher when I receive e-mails saying what a great job I’ve done or educated people in some way.

What do you enjoy least about your specialty?

Not everything in chemistry is fascinating. Sometimes it can be deadly boring.

How would you suggest networking within your specialty? (Networking advice can include associations to join, web forums to browse, advice on meeting people and potential clients in a writer’s local area, etc.)

You need a balance. On-line networking is fine but sometimes you have to pound the pavement and just get out there. Join professional organizations, go to the gym, get outside, and bring your business cards wherever you go. You want get that much business talking to your cats all day. Perhaps some mental health institutions might hire you if that is the case. The more you do it, the easier it becomes.

What advice would you give to freelance writers interested in specializing in your area?

Be patient. This is going to take a long time in this market. Plant the seeds but expect that you probably won’t receive any clients for a while. When things start turning around, you want people to remember, “that Tim Fitzpatrick, yeah, he’s that science writer guy.”

Who hasn’t heard this song?

Beans, beans, the miracle fruit
The more you eat, the more you toot
The more you toot, the better you feel
So eat your beans with every meal

Beans can indeed be a miracle fruit for anyone on a budget. Rich in fiber, they fill you up fast and are inexpensive. Personally, black bean soup is a favorite of mine. Chili, three-bean salad, even simple beans and rice can go a long away for those looking to save a few bucks.

Many recipes call for beans to be soaked overnight before cooking. The theory is that by soaking the beans, you are essentially leeching out the compounds that…well make you toot. Could you also be washing some important nutrients as well Scientists aimed to find out. A study was published in the Journal of Food Science by a group of scientists from India where beans are an important staple.

Soluble fiber in the beans is the main culprit of flatulence. More specifically, it is the bacteria within our gut that produces the offending odor. The fiber moves through our digestive tract undigested and makes its way down to the large intestine where bacteria go to work. The bacteria, for lack of a better term, eat the fiber, and through their own metabolic processes, produce a gas that eventually makes its way out of our system. Soaking not only reduces the cooking time for the beans but it also washes away some of that soluble fiber which leads to less work for the bacteria and less flatulence for us.

The researchers took five legumes (white kidney bean, red kidney bean, lentil, chickpea, and white gram). These beans are very common throughout the world. They were soaked in:

Water
2% NaCl (salt) solution
Acetic acid (vinegar)
Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)

What they found were reductions in phytic acid and tannins.

Phytic acid is known as a chelator, which can bond with minerals such as calcium, zinc, magnesium, and iron in our bodies. Once this bonding occurs, these minerals are useless to us in that our bodies can’t absorb them in this form. When combined, they form insoluble salts or phytates and end up being excreted.This is a real problem in developing countries whose populations may suffer from mineral deficiencies if too much phytic acid is ingested. For people in more developed countries, phytic acid can have some therapeutic benefits. Since we can get enough minerals from different foods, the phytic acid can act as a phytonutrient anti-oxidant which may prevent colon cancer.

Tannins are defensive compounds found in plants. They are present as a defense
mechanism because they mess with the surface proteins on bacteria and fungi,which attack it. The chemical process is similar to putting a square peg into a round hole. The tannins rearrange the proteins on the attacking bacteria so it can’t bind to the receptors on the plant. These tannins also deter herbivores by producing a bitter taste in the mouth and interfering with digestion. They act in a similar fashion as phytic acid by combining with minerals rendering them useless to our bodies. Due to this, phytic acid and tannins get the name anti-nutrients.

The results found by scientists were that the maximum reduction of these anti-nutrients occurred when the beans were soaked in sodium bicarbonate followed by cooking. Although soaking did slightly reduce the amount of protein, minerals, and sugars in the beans, it looks like a good option to keep those anti-nutrients at bay. As an added plus, it won’t make you toot as much.

I was hanging out doing some work when I realized that I needed to tend to a bone-in turkey breast I bought at the store a few days back. I had placed in the freezer and defrosted in the refrigerator for a couple days so it was now or never. Word of caution her folks, never defrost anything at room temperature. It takes bacteria all of twenty minutes to build up enough colonies to have bad things happen to you. I wasn’t about to take any chances with salmonella either so in the refrigerator it went.

Anyway, back to the story at hand. It is too nice a day to cook it in the oven and quite frankly, I didn’t want to clean up the mess and so to the grill I went. Whoever invented the art of the barbecue should get some sort of award.

The way I cooked the turkey was low and slow. With a big enough grill, you can use the indirect heat method. It is a pretty simple concept in that one burner is turned on and the other side remains off. Heat will travel from the working burner to the other side of the grill to cook the turkey indirectly. This should keep help with any hot spots that may exist on your grill. If you have a grill with three burners, even better. Turn on the outer two burners and leave the middle one off. Place the turkey in the center and the heat will come at it from both sides but not directly underneath. By not cooking over a flame, flareups are prevented when the fat drippings start to drop from the bird. Turkey and chicken can become dry pretty quickly, so some people place a pot of water on the grill to prevent moisture loss.

Chicken and turkey obviously contain protein which are found in muscles that contain an elastic substance called collagen. Collagen is a protein that attaches muscles to bones. It takes a lot of heat energy to melt that collagen away. When cooked too long, the proteins that had previously unravelled (due to heat) now coagulate and reform but into a smaller, tightly bound bundle resulting in dry meat. Since I was cooking a turkey breast, which has minimal fat, I had to be careful. Turkey meat contains about 60% water and the longer the cooking process, the more moisture is lost. Most of that water remains bound up within the proteins themselves so my goal was to minimize moisture loss.

You may want to rub a little oil on the grill (while it is cool) first to prevent sticking. Use a high temperature oil such as vegetable or canola oil as olive oil has a low smoking point. You can also rub some oil on the bird itself. The first step is to heat up your grill on high for 10-15 minutes. After it is about 500 ºF, place the turkey on the grill. Use a meat thermometer to gauge the inside temperature of the turkey. If you have an old fashioned thermometer, place it in the meat before cooking.

The FDA recommends that turkey breast be cooked 165 ºF while the National Turkey Federation recommends 170 ºF. During the last ten minutes of cooking, you can add your favorite sauce to it (barbecue, teriyaki, etc.). Many of these sauces have sugars which can burn and char your meat if left on too long so try not to add them too early.

I am currently writing an article on oxidation and free radicals and I thought I’d go over the basics for those interested in how it relates to food. I’ll give you one guess as to what element oxidation refers to. If you guessed boron that would be incorrect. The correct answer is of course oxygen. Free radicals and oxygen go hand in hand in biological reactions.

To give you a simple example of oxidation, take an apple and slice it in half. Leave it on the counter for a few minutes, watch it turn brown, and you have just witnessed the phenomenon of oxidation. By breaking the skin on an apple, you have just exposed the it’s cells to oxygen and have seen first hand the destruction of those cells.

Free radicals are compounds that are highly reactive due to the presence of a lone pair of electrons. Electrons do not enjoy being in pairs because of the instability factor. Much like the economy today, nothing really likes to be unstable. The same goes for the natural world. I harken back to the movie Titanic where a member of the crew shoots a gun in the air and says “maintain order here”. The same goes for electrons in that they want to be stable. Okay, movie tangent over, back to the food thing.

So, at a molecular level, we have electrons wanting to be in pairs when in walks these free radical types whose electrons have no dance partner or pair and are very unstable. What do they do? They walk around the dance floor like an overzealous teenage boy looking to pick up a dance partner. It could be the girl against the wall, the girl on the floor, the chaperone, or your buddies date. Free radicals don’t care, they just wants to become stable so they will grab anybody.

When this free radical steals someone else’s date, they have just created another free radical who is looking for a dance partner and the whole process starts again. The next thing you know the whole dance floor (our cells) becomes saturated with free radicals and chaos ensues. This chaos leads to mutated cells and loss of proper cell functioning.

Transfer that metaphor to your diet and cooking habits. Examples of the stag free radical stealing dates are:

cigarettes
smog
intense exercise
stress
alcohol
charred food
pesticides
UV light

In walks the savior of the dance known as anti-oxidants. They come in and help clear everything up. They protect against the free radicals by bonding with them. Essentially, they share their date (electron) with the free radical. Anti-oxidants are found in foods that contain:

Beta-carotene (carrots, sweet potatoes, cantaloupes, squash, mangoes)

Lutein - green leafy vegetables such as spinach, collard greens, and kale

Lycopene - tomatoes, watermelon, guava, papaya, apricots, pink grapefruits

Vitamin A - sweet potatoes and carrots

Vitamin C - apples, oranges, pineapples, strawberries, blueberries

Vitamin E - wheat germ, some oils (corn, safflower, soybean), green leafy vegetables, whole grains, avocadoes, almonds, olives, nuts, broccoli

If you start to include these anti-oxidants in your diet perhaps you won’t ever get stood up on the dance flood again. At least your dance floor (your cells) will be better protected from those lurking free radicals.