Tart and trendy, cranberries are everywhere
POSTED: 10:56 a.m. EST, November 20, 2006
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SHAMONG TOWNSHIP, New Jersey (AP) -- Long a jellied side dish at Thanksgiving, cranberries are increasingly bringing their tart taste and health benefits to products beyond Cosmopolitan cocktails and juice drinks.

The red berries are turning up in everything from confections and wines to soaps and salsas, with many cranberry growers hawking an array of products at their own stores or over the Internet.

The Joseph J. White Inc. cranberry farm in New Jersey, the No. 3 cranberry producing state, has even started using them for agritourism. It gives bus rides around flooded bogs during the October harvest to teach visitors all about cranberry lore. Growers in Wisconsin, the No. 1. producer, and in No. 2 Massachusetts have done so for years.

Cranberry sales -- fresh, frozen, in juices and dried for snacks or ingredients in cereals and other products -- are approaching $1.5 billion a year in this country, said Ken Romanzi, chief operating officer of Ocean Spray, a huge cooperative owned by about 650 North American cranberry growers and some grapefruit farmers.

The boom of the berry is due to proven health benefits that have fueled marketing campaigns and consumer popularity, fast-expanding markets overseas, particularly Japan and western Europe, and a big bust in the U.S. industry in 2000. That year, cranberry prices collapsed amid a surplus driven by farmers expanding their bogs and speculators jumping in after cranberry prices rose rapidly in the late 1990s.

"It certainly caused people to find new uses for cranberries," said Joe Darlington, a fifth-generation cranberry farmer who runs the 350-acre White farm in Shamong Township, New Jersey, with his wife. "It's what led us to open (our) store and start the tours."

Cranberry processors such as Ocean Spray had already branched out to juice blends a couple of decades earlier, after a prior industry bust.

In the past several years, farmers and processors, primarily small operations, have introduced cranberry mustard and chutney, gourmet cranberry sauces, dried cranberries in trail mixes, cranberry-flavored ice cream, hand lotions and cosmetics made from cranberry seed oil, and even cranberry beer, said Tom Lochner, executive director of the cranberry growers association in Wisconsin.

Cranberries, native only to North America, also are grown in Oregon, Washington State and British Columbia and Quebec in Canada.

"People realized cranberries can be used in a lot of different ways," said Lochner, noting there are more than 700 cranberry products on the market.

Fine restaurants also have been increasingly using cranberries in salads, desserts, sauces and stuffing, and the cranberry industry has been circulating recipes featuring the berries.

Ocean Spray, which will process nearly two-thirds of the estimated 660 million-pound U.S. harvest this year and make about $1 billion in revenue for its members, has been on a campaign for two years "to reintroduce the cranberry to America," Romanzi said. Its ads feature farmers standing in cranberry bogs and promote the berries as "cleansing and purifying."

"We've seen a direct correlation between our advertising and our increase in sales," Romanzi said. Ocean Spray juice sales are up about 6 percent this year while the overall juice category is down and sales of its Craisins -- dried, sweetened cranberries -- are up 100 percent over the last two years and likely to double again, he said.

Sales of cranberry wine have been rising steadily at Valenzano Winery in Shamong, New Jersey. It now produces about 3,000 gallons a year, bringing in 15 percent to 20 percent of total income, said Tony Valenzano Jr., who runs the decade-old winery about halfway between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Atlantic City, New Jersey, with his brother and father.

"It's a good seller year-round, but 80 percent of the sales are for Thanksgiving and Christmas," he said.

Valenzano makes wine from both red cranberries and white ones _ picked just before they fully ripen and turn red. The winery is among several in New Jersey that produce wines made from locally grown cranberries.

Cranberries also are being featured in agritourism as visitors head to farms to see how farmers raise crops and animals or enjoy holiday festivals.

"There's a lot of interest in seeing the cranberry harvest because it's very unique and quite colorful," said Darlington, of the White farm. "The response has been very enthusiastic."

Darlington estimates 500 people took the October tours, up from barely 50 in the first season two years ago. His wife, Brenda Conner, also a fifth-generation cranberry farmer, runs the two-hour bus tours.

Visitors get to see tons of ripe, red cranberries bobbing in the just-flooded bogs, gathered together by floating booms, sucked up into machines and then loaded onto trucks before being transported to an Ocean Spray cooperative facility for processing.

The tour also includes a stop at Whitesbog, a still-inhabited village built in the 19th century that once served as a sort-of company town for farm employees before automation reduced the number of workers needed. It ends at the family store, The Cranberry Connection, which sells fresh and frozen berries, cranberry nuggets, chocolate-covered cranberries and other yummies, plus dozens of other things cranberry.

Ocean Spray, meanwhile, has been bringing bogs directly to the public, building them in downtown New York, Chicago and Los Angeles this month to promote cranberries.

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fat
Fats consist of a wide group of compounds that are generally soluble in organic solvents and largely insoluble in water.

Fats may be either solid or liquid at normal room temperature, depending on their structure and composition. Although the words "oils", "fats" and "lipids" are all used to refer to fats, "oils" is usually used to refer to fats that are liquids at normal room temperature, while "fats" is usually used to refer to fats that are solids at normal room temperature. "Lipids" is used to refer to both liquid and solid fats.

Fats form a category of lipid, distinguished from other lipids by their chemical structure and physical properties. Fats are solid at room temperature as opposed to oils which are liquid. This category of molecules is important for many forms of life, serving both structural and metabolic functions. They are an important part of the diet of most heterotrophs (including humans).

Contents [hide]
1 Chemical structure
2 Importance for living things
3 Adipose tissue
4 See also
5 References



[edit] Chemical structure

Chemical structure of trimyristin, a triglyceride.There are many different kinds of fats, but each kind is a variation on the same chemical structure. All fats consist of fatty acids (chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms, with an oxygen atom at one end and occasionally other molecules) bonded to a backbone structure, often glycerol (a "backbone" of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen). Chemically, this is a triester of glycerol, being the molecule formed from the reaction of an acid and an alcohol. As a simple visual illustration, if the kinks and angles of these chains were straightened out, the molecule would have the shape of a capital letter E. The fatty acids would each be a horizontal line; the glycerol "backbone" would be the vertical line that joins the horizontal lines. Fats have "ester" bonds.

The properties of any specific fat molecule depend on the particular fatty acids that help to make it up. Different fatty acids are comprised of different numbers of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The carbon atoms, each bonded to two neighboring carbon atoms, form a zigzagging chain; the more carbon atoms there are in any fatty acid, the longer its chain will be. Fatty acids with long chains are more susceptible to intermolecular forces of attraction (in this case, van der Waals forces), raising its melting point. Long chains also yield more energy per molecule when metabolized.

A fat's constituent fatty acids may also differ in the number of hydrogen atoms that branch off of the chain of carbon atoms. Each carbon atom is typically bonded to two hydrogen atoms. When a fatty acid has this typical arrangement, it is called "saturated", because the carbon atoms are saturated with hydrogen; meaning they are bonded to as many hydrogens as they possibly could be. In other fats, a carbon atom may instead bond to only one other hydrogen atom, and have a double bond to a neighboring carbon atom. This results in an "unsaturated" fatty acid. More specifically, it would be a "monounsaturated" fatty acid. Whereas, a "polyunsaturated" fatty acid would be a fatty acid with more than one double bond.

Saturated and unsaturated fats differ in their energy content and melting point. Since an unsaturated fat contains fewer carbon-hydrogen bonds than a saturated fat with the same number of carbon atoms, unsaturated fats will yield slightly less energy during metabolism than saturated fats with the same number of carbon atoms. Saturated fats can stack themselves in a closely packed arrangement, so they can freeze easily and are typically solid at room temperature. But the rigid double bond in an unsaturated fat fundamentally changes the chemistry of the fat. There are two ways the double bond may be arranged: the isomer with the both parts of the chain on the same side of the double bond (the cis-isomer), or the isomer with the parts of the chain on opposite sides of the double bond (the trans-isomer). Most trans-isomer fats (commonly called trans fats) are commercially produced rather than naturally occurring. The cis-isomer introduces a kink into the molecule that prevents the fats from stacking efficiently like with saturated chains. This decreases intermolecular forces between the fat molecules, making it more difficult for unsaturated cis-fats to freeze; they are typically liquid at room temperature. Trans fats may still stack like saturated fats, and are not as susceptible to metabolization as other fats. Trans fats significantly increase the risk of coronary heart disease.[1]


[edit] Importance for living things
Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble, meaning they can only be digested, absorbed, and transported in conjunction with fats. Fats are sources of essential fatty acids, an important dietary requirement.

Fats play a vital role in maintaining healthy skin and hair, insulating body organs against shock, maintaining body temperature, and promoting healthy cell function. They also serve as energy stores for the body. Fats are broken down in the body to release glycerol and free fatty acids. The glycerol can be converted to glucose by the liver and thus used as a source of energy. The fatty acids are a good source of energy for many tissues, especially heart and skeletal muscle.

The fat content of a food can be analyzed by extraction. The exact method varies on what type of fat you are analyzing - for example, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats are tested quite differently.

Fat also serves as a useful buffer towards a host of diseases. When a particular substance, whether chemical or biotic -- reaches unsafe levels in the bloodstream, the body can effectively dilute -- or at least maintain equilibrium of -- the offending substances by storing it in new fat tissue. This helps to protect vital organs, until such time as the offending substances can be metabolized and/or removed from the body by such means as excretion, urination, accidental or intentional bloodletting, sebum excretion, and hair growth.


[edit] Adipose tissue
Main article: Adipose tissue
Adipose, or fatty tissue is the human body's means of storing metabolic energy over extended periods of time. Depending on current physiological conditions, adipocytes store fat derived from the diet and liver metabolism or degrades stored fat to supply fatty acids and glycerol to the circulation. These metabolic activities are regulated by several hormones (i.e., insulin, glucagon and epinephrine). The location of the tissue determines its metabolic profile: "Visceral fat" is located within the abdominal wall (i.e., beneath the wall of abdominal muscle) whereas "subcutaneous fat" is located beneath the skin (and includes fat that is located in the abdominal area beneath the skin but above the abdominal muscle wall). It was briefly thought that visceral fat produced a hormone involved in insulin resistance, but this has been disproven by clinical tests (see, resistin, a hormone, ultimately misnamed, which is produced by adipose tissue and does cause insulin resistance in mice but not in humans).