With the modernization of its traditional irrigation system, the irrigation community of the Acequia Real del Júcar (Valencia), established in the year 1258, went from using 392 cubic hectometres (hm3) per year in 1998 to 214 hm3 today m

Protein bars are within everyone's reach. You can find them in the supermarket, near the cashiers so you don't miss seeing them, in online stores like Amazon, in gyms, in sports supplement stores…. and even in pharmacies. What flavour is it? Of those you can imagine: white, dark or milk chocolate, biscuit flavor, cheesecake or peanut butter…. and even the best-known brands of chocolate bars such as M&M, Snickers, Bounty or Mars. Promising ads everywhere: they give you protein, energy and some even claim to help you lose weight and burn fat. There is also no shortage of videos on social networks of influencers trying them out and alluding to how good they are.. But are they really necessary? And healthy?

Francisco Botella, coordinator of the nutrition area of the Spanish Society of Endocrinology and Nutrition (SEEN), explains that protein bars are unnecessary. “People who eat healthy, for example, those who eat a Mediterranean diet, do not need to supplement”. Proteins can be found in various foods such as legumes, nuts, meat, fish, dairy products or eggs, he points out.. “If a patient tells me that they consume these types of products, I would tell them that there are much more beneficial sources of natural protein.. The best quality is in the egg white and in the albumen of the milk”.

Proteins are one of the basic nutrients in food at any age.. “They make up the whole body: skin, hair, bones, muscles…. practically our entire body is protein,” says Botella. Proteins are continuously being formed and degraded, so we need to incorporate them into our diet to replace those that are being degraded. The doctor adds that an adult should take a little less than 1 gram for every kilo they weigh per day, 0.8 grams is the ration indicated by the WHO. The amounts change depending on whether there is a pathology or a specific situation, such as pregnancy: “The range is between a minimum of 0.8 and a maximum of 1.5 grams for the vast majority of the population,” says the spokesperson. of the SEEN.

“We assume that we eat very badly. So the food industry offers us these apparent solutions, those foods that they call functional”. Is it necessary to take protein bars? “Obviously not”, says Botella. He explains that a poor diet is not improved with these products: “Society needs nutritional education, not bars”. “Companies are taking advantage of the bad habits of the population to sell them these products as something necessary when they are not, there are many commercial interests and this moves a lot of money,” he says.

Companies are taking advantage of the bad habits of the population to sell these products as something necessary when they are not, there are many commercial interests and this moves a lot of money

Francis Bottle

Ok, they are not necessary, but what about healthy? There are different types: there are some with more or less sugar, some even with 20 grams per unit and not very beneficial fats.. When buying one, you should look at its ingredients to find out why it is made, and thus know if it can be healthy or not.. “Less than a quarter of people look at the ingredients on the labels of the products they are buying, therefore, many people do not know what they are eating,” says the nutritionist.. What he's aiming for: “A protein bar loses much of its nutritional interest if it's accompanied by added sugars or unhealthy fats.. They become ultra-processed and therefore these would not be recommended.”

The endocrinologist talks about another of the false promises indicated in the advertising: “They do not help to burn fat or lose weight, the only thing is that they usually have a slightly higher satiety index and, perhaps, it takes a little longer to have hunger”. “I would never recommend a patient take protein bars to lose weight, it would be a little ridiculous from a medical point of view”. There is a large industry behind these foods and it must be taken into account: “In the end, everything is a marketing strategy,” remarks Botella.

Every minute the equivalent of a garbage truck full of plastic waste is dumped into the oceans. A comparison often used by international organizations to describe the “time bomb” of plastic pollution. A multiple threat that is not limited to marine spaces or to the mere question of waste; Throughout their life cycle (from the extraction of the fossil fuels needed to make them to their disposal), plastics (there are more than 4,000 types) represent a global threat to the environment, health and climate.

One of the main responses to this crisis is to improve the circularity of packaging. Recycling allows you to create new objects without the need to extract additional raw materials. Many of the products we use on a daily basis are already being made with recycled material from the yellow and blue containers and which are used to create all kinds of objects: from new packaging to textile fibers to make swimsuits or beach loungers.

The path towards a circular economy also involves promoting responsible consumption and reuse as prior alternatives to recycling. Driven by the new community objectives, companies that work with plastic containers move towards their reduction or elimination. “The reduction of plastic and the promotion of the circular economy throughout the production, distribution and commercialization cycle is one of the objectives in which we are working to achieve a balance with the planet”, explains Carmen Guembe, director of Sustainability at Suntory. Beverage & Food Spain.

Since 2022, all Schweppes plastic is 100% recycled and recyclable and the company claims that La Casera's will also be by the end of this year. By 2030, the company expects all packaging to be 100% sustainable, made from recycled PET. “In addition, we collaborate with expert partners in this field, such as CARBIOS, a company specialized in chemical recycling, investing in the development of new technologies that allow us to enzymatically recycle plastic, thus facilitating the incorporation of more recycled plastic in our packaging” adds Carmen Guembe.

For this system to work, the first step is the involvement of citizens, who have already integrated recovery as part of their daily lives. According to the study Habits of the Spanish population regarding recycling by the Catchment Institute for Ecoembes, four out of five Spaniards, that is, 82.9%, state that they have, on average, 3 bins or spaces at home to recycle.. Thus, in 2022, each citizen separated 27.1 kilos of plastic containers, cans, briks and paper and cardboard. Thanks to the recycling of more than 1.6 million tons of packaging, last year the consumption of 21.46 million cubic meters of water and 6.72 million MWh of energy were saved, in addition to avoiding the emission of 1 79 million tons of CO into the atmosphere.

new types

The path towards circularity implies advancing in the recycling of other types of waste that, up to now, have not had a mandatory separate collection, such as textiles or organic matter. In the market you can already find garments made with recycled fabrics, also swimsuits and bikinis, made of nylon, bamboo and polyester from recycled plastic.

A hat made with ECOALF recycled material

In textiles, projects like Ecoalf's Upcycling the Oceans have spent several seasons recycling marine debris and turning it into bikinis. “Recycled marine debris has different applications, an example is the conversion of PET plastic into polyester thread for use in the textile industry,” they explain from the Basque company. “More than 4,200 fishermen collaborate daily with the project on a voluntary basis to recover the garbage that remains trapped in their nets, the waste is deposited in specific containers in the port and periodically transported to treatment plants for classification”. Ecoalf also gives used car tires a second life by transforming them into flip-flop soles.

And other typical summer objects are made of recycled material -many of them thanks to the plastic containers, cans and briks that the citizens throw into the yellow container. The Aragonese Industrias Agapito creates sun loungers made of steel and recycled plastic made from cans of drinks and preserves. A raw material that has many advantages over other materials such as wood. “Resists inclement weather, does not splinter and can be easily cleaned,” the company says. In addition, they ensure that “this urban furniture, apart from coming from recycling – between 1,000 and 1,500 plastic containers can be recycled in each sheet of a bench – is reusable once its useful life is exhausted or it degrades.”

Circular Economy series carried out in collaboration with the Ecoembes organization.

All the mysteries of the organism pass through the flora and fauna of our intestinal system. O no. The truth is that for any pathology there is always evidence in the microbiome. And the time has come when scientists have said that not everything is so and that “if we constantly repeat falsehoods about minor details, can our accuracy be trusted when we cover more important matters?”.

This is how emphatic Alan Walker and Lesley Hoyles show themselves in a Perspective article in Nature Microbiology. In it, they have dissected the explosion of recent research on the human microbiome and have put on the table the inaccuracies that lack a solid evidence base..

From all of this analysis they have summarized 12 persistent or emerging myths and misconceptions describing their factual inaccuracies.. This surge in interest has also generated hype and entrenched some misconceptions.. Statements on this subject can be repeated to be considered fact, without strong supporting evidence and with ambiguity regarding the original source.

Walker and Hoyles, researchers from the Universities of Aberdeen and Nottingham, say that demystifying and correcting misconceptions, even if they are relatively minor, is important to avoid unproductive research projects, encourage critical thinking and preserve public confidence in microbiome science..

1. New field. Although the most prosperous advances date from 15 years ago, the first investigations on microorganisms associated with humans occurred more than a hundred years ago. The Escherichia coli bacterium was described as early as 1885.

2. Joshua Lederberg coined the term “microbiome.” The Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist is not responsible for the naming in 2001, because microbiota is a basic microbiological term in common use for at least 50 years.

3. There are 1012 bacterial cells per gram of human feces. Through complex tests, it has been determined that it usually ranges between 1010 and 1011 microbial cells per gram of wet weight of feces..

4. It weighs between one and two kilos. At most it reaches 500 grams. This is because the majority of the human microbiota resides in the colon, and “these microorganisms usually represent less than half the weight of fecal solids.”

5. It outnumbers human cells by a ratio of 10:1. It is one of the most repeated misconceptions. It has been shown to have originated from an “end of the envelope” calculation in the 1970s, when in reality the ratio is closer to 1:1. It should be noted that “the ratio is likely to vary from person to person and depends on factors such as the size of the host's body and the amount of fecal material carried in the colon.”

6. It is inherited from mother to son. Although some microorganisms are transferred during childbirth, proportionally few species of microbiota are truly “inherited” and persist from birth to adulthood in offspring. “Each adult ends up with a unique microbiota setup, even identical twins raised in the same household.”

7. Most diseases are characterized by a pathobiome. This concept has been “loosely” defined as detrimental interactions between microbial communities and their host that lead to disease. Unfortunately, “this term is too simplistic and inherently flawed.” There is no evidence that it has a characteristic role in “most” diseases.

8. The firmicutes-bacteroidetes relationship is altered in obesity. This statement, about two of the five families of bacteria present in the microbiota, is commonly used but erroneous “derives primarily from rodent-based research and from findings in single or underpowered human studies”. However, as with many other studies reporting links between specific microbiota profiles and disease, “reproducibility is poor.”.

9. The microbiome is functionally redundant. This argument stems from studies showing that while “the taxonomic composition of human metagenomes can vary enormously”. Although there are important functions that are conserved in many different species of human microbiota, such as the production of short-chain fatty acids, “there are many key functions that are only carried out by a relatively small number of microbiota species.”.

10. Sequencing is unbiased. Although sequence-based methods have been transformative for microbiome research, they are not perfect.

11. Need for a standardized methodology. This view is prevalent in the microbiome field and is sensibly based on a desire to make it easier and more robust to compare results from different studies..

12. Most of the human microbiota is 'uncultivable'. While cultivation is undeniably labor intensive, “it has its own biases and often requires expensive specialized equipment and media, there are clear advantages to having microorganisms in culture.”. These include enabling mechanistic experiments, verifying genomic predictions, and developing them as novel therapies..

Reactions from the scientific community

Toni Gabaldón, ICREA research professor and head of the Comparative Genomics group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), explains to SMC that “the field of microbiome study (like other fields in rapid expansion) suffers from the existence of dogmas and simplifications assumed early on based on very limited information and that we have to correct and modulate as we learn more. One of the most important qualities of science is its ability to self-correct.”.

Along with him, also at SMC, Rob Knight, director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and professor at the University of California, San Diego, points out that “the non-replication of associations of the microbiome with disease is an important issue, but has more nuances than described in the article. To be useful as a clinical test, a microbe or microbiome pattern need not cause disease, but simply act as a precise marker of disease.”.

There are other experts who state that “this type of article does not provide new results, but it can help the field to advance more precisely and focus efforts on priority research questions”, as Mireia Vallés-Colomer, an expert microbiologist in the field, argues. study of the impact of the intestinal microbiome on health, researcher at the Computational Metagenomics Laboratory of the University of Trento (Italy).

But, as Michael Woodworth, a researcher in microbial therapeutics, Associate Professor of Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, points out, “Many of these myths have already been highlighted by earlier authors, but they need to be consolidated to discourage their perpetuation.

Smoking kills. In Spain, there is a death every 11 minutes due to tobacco and it is estimated that it is responsible for 30% of all cancer deaths. If we don't do something, tobacco and its derivatives will continue to kill us. And despite these data, the tobacco industry continues to reinvent itself so as not to lose customers or lose business.

In the golden years of Hollywood, he used movie stars to promote his products by making smoking glamorous.. Neither then nor now has the industry stopped hiding the fact that its products, conventional tobacco and new devices, harm health and kill.

If before it was cigarettes, now it's vapers. If before they were the stars of Hollywood, now they are the Influencers. A study by our Association shows that 9 out of 10 young people are exposed to digital smoke through social networks and on-demand platforms. In addition, 57.2% of these young people believe that smoking is fashionable because actors, streamers or influencers do it. Early use of electronic cigarettes pushes adolescents and children to be traditional smokers in the future