The judges decided to make today's Headline of the Day Award to the the Guardian. And I'm glad they did, because the story below is fascinating.
Nadia Mohd-Radzman is the scientist whose research is being reported:
However, it is the ingredient levodopa, or L-dopa, which is of special interest to Mohd-Radzman, who also works at the Entrepreneurship Lab of King’s College Cambridge. It is used in the clinical treatment of people with Parkinson’s – and broad beans contain high levels of the compound.
"The crucial point is that L-dopa has been shown to be very effective in treating the condition known as anhedonia, which essentially is the inability to feel or experience pleasure. And that is why I believe the broad bean is important.
"We have a major problem with growing numbers of young people experiencing mental health problems in the UK today, and helping them eat a proper, healthy diet is going to be crucial in tackling this. The broad bean will be our first line of attack."
Later. The judges have asked me to pass on their comment that "the cure for Britain's blues" would be idiomatic English and their doubts that the formulation used in the headline is even grammatical.
2 comments:
This isn't the first Report into the virtues of Broad Bean which could also be used to supplement bread flour, shortages of which have been caused by the Ukraine war. There is one problem though: despite seeing massive fields of them from the train I haven't seen them for sale in my local Sainsbury's for years. I bought three packets of them when I visited a branch of Waitrose recently, but that exhausted their stock. What happens to them?
I think what you see from the train are probably field beans - closely related to broad beans and perfectly edible, but they don't go into the human food chain, at least not as recognisable beans.
Why don't people eat them ? To get the real fresh taste you have to pick them at the right time and remove the skin form each individual beam. Far too much trouble unless you grow them yourself.
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