A trip down the bread aisle nowadays is nothing short of confusing for most consumers. It seems the variety in shape, sizes and composition is forever increasing.

The manufacturers use healthy marketing terms such as “whole grain”, “multigrain”, “wholewheat” and “Low GI”, making it difficult for consumers to know if they’re making a wise choice. 

It’s advisable to look beyond the health claims on the packaging and rather study the nutritional information as displayed on the back of the product. By doing this, you will know what the bread contains and how it compares with other breads on the market.

Whole is key

When choosing a bread, always choose the wholegrain option. Wholegrain products contain the entire grain. This includes the endosperm, germ, (provides protein and a variety of vitamins and minerals) and the outer layer called the bran (providing fibre).

But why are whole grains important?

The consumption of wholegrain foods has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers and may also help prevent obesity.

What is the difference between wholewheat and wholegrain bread?

Wholewheat bread does not have all three parts of the grain kernel in the same quantities as wholegrain bread. Some of the germ and bran have been removed. Wholegrain breads are healthier and much heavier than wholewheat breads due to their higher fibre content. They also contain more vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. 

What do the other terms like ‘multigrain’, ‘enriched’ or ‘stone ground’ mean?

• Multigrain: This type of bread contains more than one grain (e.g. wheat, rice, and corn) and may not contain the whole grain or much fibre. 
• Enriched: These are usually white or wholewheat breads that have vitamins and minerals (normally iron or B vitamins) added after the refining process.
• Stone ground: This term refers to a type of grinding the grain undergoes, but doesn’t necessarily mean whole grain.

Tips to help you make the best choice when shopping:

1. Read the label

When analysing breads, the key features to check for are the overall kilojoule content; the carbohydrate content; and most importantly, the fibre content per 100g bread.

2. What’s actually in there?

You can’t rely on the marketing slogans on the packaging when choosing bread. You have to look at the list of ingredients. By law, a food manufacturer must list ingredients in descending order based on their weight. This means that the first ingredient is the most abundant.

Look for bread made with wholegrain wheat flour, wholegrain corn, whole rye, whole oats, wheat germ, amaranth, barley, buckwheat, millet, spelt, quinoa or bulgur wheat. This should be number one on the ingredient list.

3. Don’t be swayed 

Don’t be impressed by terms like “multigrain”, “stone ground”, “wholewheat”, “enriched”, “bran” or “brown” or “low GI”, as these terms do not mean that the bread contains the whole grain. These are just ways to create the impression that the bread is healthy. 

4. Focus on fibre

An adequate fibre intake is essential to optimal gut health. Poor gut health has been linked to the development of a variety of chronic diseases such as obesity, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and even some mental conditions. The recommended fibre content is six grams of fibre or more per 100g of bread. The fibre comes from the outer bran layer that is left intact in whole grains.

According to the American Dietary Guidelines, you should aim for 25–35 grams of fibre per day, and half of your daily fibre intake should come from a variety of whole grains.

5. Serving size matters if you are watching your weight  

Bread slices come in many sizes and weights. On average, a slice of bread ranges from 20 to 35 grams of carbohydrates per slice. Look at the nutritional label to find out how many grams in a slice of bread, as this may help you to decide which is best for you. Bread manufacturers are now slicing bread more thinly to assist consumers with portion control. General wisdom dictates that in order to lose weight one should not eat too much bread.

Below is the nutritional profile of a number of breads:

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Mayuri Bhawan

Holding an egg is a lot different from holding an apple or a tomato, and humans are naturally able to adjust their grip to avoid crushing or dropping each object.

Artificial hands installed on prosthetic limbs and robots don’t have that natural ability – yet.

A network of sensors

An inexpensive, sensor-laden glove could lay the groundwork for advanced prosthetic hands that are better able to grasp and manipulate day-to-day objects, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers report.

The glove costs just $10 but contains a network of 548 sensors that gather detailed information about objects being manipulated by the hand inside the glove, they said.

Using the glove, the researchers are creating “tactile maps” that could be used to improve the dexterity of artificial hands, said lead scientist Subramanian Sundaram, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.

“You can look at these tactile maps and begin to understand what kind of objects you’re interacting with. We also show you can use these tactile maps to estimate the weight of the object you’re carrying,” Sundaram said. “We can clearly unravel or quantify how the different regions of the hand come together to perform a grasping task.”

Sundaram and his colleagues developed the glove to help improve the fine motor skills of robot hands.

“This has really been a grand challenge in all of robotics – how do you build dexterous robots, robots that can manipulate objects much in the way humans do?” Sundaram said.

A huge amount of tactile data

Their solution involves a simple knitted glove that has a force-sensitive film applied along the touching surfaces of the palm and fingers, feeding data to hundreds of sensors.

Researchers wearing the glove interacted with a set of 26 different objects with a single hand for more than five hours, creating a huge amount of tactile data.

They then fed the data into a computer, training it to identify each object from the way it was held.

“We can look at a collective set of interactions and we can say with generality how different regions of the hand are used together,” Sundaram said. “You can understand how likely you are to use each region in combination with the others to grasp an object.”

Using this data, robots fitted with similar sensors could be taught to handle and manipulate fine objects without squeezing them too hard or handling them with butterfingers, Sundaram said.

But the data from these gloves also could be used to vastly improve the intelligence of prosthetic hands, said David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.

A huge drop in cost

“When you look at this technology, the first thing that pops to mind is this is an extraordinarily low-cost training platform for creating a repository of grip strategies,” said Putrino, who wasn’t involved with the study.

As recently as five years ago, this sort of technology would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he noted.

“What these guys have achieved is an order-of-magnitude drop in the cost of what they can do with these flexible, stitched in electrodes, so it’s very exciting,” Putrino said.

It would probably be too much to expect a person to deal with all of the feedback from a prosthetic hand fitted with the same amount of sensors as the glove, Putrino said.

“Given how many sensors that they have, it would be like learning a very complicated language,” he said.

However, such data from the gloves could be used to install prosthetic hands with programmes designed to grasp different objects in the most sensitive and effective way, Putrino said.

Grasping and hand-posturing profiles

A person could either use voice commands to tell their hand what they plan to grasp, or the hand could be fitted with a camera that automatically recognises different objects about to be grabbed, Putrino said.

That way, the prosthetic hand would be able to apply an egg-handling strategy to an egg, and an apple-handling strategy to an apple, he said.

“You could have this whole repository of grasping and hand-posturing profiles for every scenario you can think of,” Putrino said.

The new report was published in the journal Nature.

Sundaram supplied this short video of the glove in action:

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Theresa Feehan died with toxic levels of prescription drugs in her body two days after a GP visit.

Additive manufacturing built an early following with 3D printers using polymers to create a solid object from a Computer-Aided Design model. The materials used were neat polymers — perfect for a rapid prototype, but not commonly used as structural materials.

Scientists from Sanford Burnham Prebys have created natural-looking hair that grows through the skin using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), a major scientific achievement that could revolutionize the hair growth industry. The findings were presented today at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) and received a Merit Award. A newly formed company, Stemson Therapeutics, has licensed the technology.

In a 600-ft.-long saltwater wave tank on the coast of New Jersey, a team of New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) researchers is conducting the largest-ever simulation of the Deepwater Horizon spill to determine more precisely where hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil dispersed following the drilling rig’s explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

As laws around marijuana relax nationwide and the drug becomes more popular, American women are increasingly using pot during pregnancy, a new study finds.

The study was based on data from more than 467 000 women collected between 2002 and 2017. The researchers found that the percentage of women who said they’d used cannabis at least once during a pregnancy doubled during that time – from 3.4% to 7%.

Potential harm to babies

And the percentage of women who reported “daily or near daily” cannabis use during pregnancy more than tripled – from 0.9% of respondents in 2002 to 3.4% by 2017, according to a team led by Dr Beth Han of the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

A second study highlighted the potential harm to babies from the trend. Canadian researchers looked at data on pregnancy outcomes for almost 662 000 women averaging 30 years of age.

The investigators found that a history of having used marijuana while pregnant was tied to a doubling of the preterm birth rate – from 6% among non-users to 12% among users. Preterm birth was defined as birth before 37 weeks’ gestation.

Cannabis use in pregnancy was also tied to higher odds for low birth weight, certain obstetric complications and the need for newborns to be cared for in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Of course, the study can’t prove cause and effect, and other risk factors – for example, concurrent drinking or tobacco smoking – could be at play, said a team led by Daniel Corsi of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, in Canada.

Easing morning sickness

But the study also found that “the risk of preterm birth … was statistically significant in subgroups of women who only used cannabis and no other substances.”

Both studies were published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In a related editorial, Drs Michael Silverstein, Elizabeth Howell and Barry Zuckerman agreed that the findings “send a straightforward message: cannabis use in pregnancy is likely unsafe; with an increasing prevalence of use (presumably related to growing social acceptability and legalisation in many states), its potential for harm may represent a public health problem.”

Not everyone is comfortable with the pot-in-pregnancy trend, however. Han’s team noted that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has long recommended “that pregnant women discontinue cannabis consumption”.

Nevertheless, in many US states the drug has actually been approved as a means of easing morning sickness. But Han’s team found that in 2017, just 0.5% of women said they used cannabis in pregnancy “for medical-only purposes”.

Laissez-faire attitude

Dr Jennifer Wu is an obstetrician-gynaecologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. Reading over the new findings she said that “in light of present information, doctors should warn patients about the risks of cannabis during pregnancy”.

Wu noted that cannabis can pass through the placenta to bring “significant risks to the foetus”.

She believes that, in light of society’s new, more laissez-faire attitude to pot use generally, “a public health campaign may be needed to reverse the general opinion of the safety of cannabis during pregnancy”.

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The affected drugs came from Italy but any risk to their effectiveness are low, patients are told.

Hospitals spend millions to remove flammable cladding amid concerns for patient safety.

It's been eight weeks since Kayla Itsines gave birth to her first child, daughter Arna Leia. It's no surprise that BBG fans have been eager to follow the trainer’s postpartum journey and see how she re-establishes a workout routine. Recently, the 28-year-old shared a quick update on Instagram to say she'd been cleared to do "light" workouts.

"Having been cleared for LIGHT workouts for over a week now (by my doctor and physiotherapist), I'm starting to really feel like myself again and not just in a physical sense," she wrote alongside one of her signature full-body mirror selfies. "I am so motivated right now because for me, fitness is my self-care, my time out and my PASSION. Being able to share my passion with YOU, the #BBGCommunity is helping me to get out of bed every morning (not forgetting my incredible family)!! #comeback" 

RELATED: Kayla Itsines Shares the Sweetest Moment With Her Baby Girl After Giving Birth

Unfortunately, some of Itsines' nearly 12 million followers accused her of looking "too fit" in the photo she posted. Some people even shamed her for having "perfect abs" so soon after giving birth.

"These kind of pictures are exactly the kind that makes women hate their bodies," commented one person. "Most women can never get your body because of genetics, no matter how much dieting or exercise they do. Having perfect abs a couple of weeks after a baby is also extremely rare."

RELATED: Tone Up With This Seven-Minute Full-Body Workout From Kayla Itsines

Another commenter shared a similar opinion: "Honestly with an account following of nearly 12mil really wished you would have posted a more raw and honest journey of your post-pregnancy experience. Very disappointing and you're just adding to the unnecessary pressure from social media for new mums to look like yourself in just a few weeks after birth."

Thankfully, several members of the BBG community were quick to defend Itsines. "Can we please stop and be a community of women that supports one [another] instead of shaming because of a person's weight," said one person. "Everyone is different and fit strong looks different on everyone because not everyone has the same body shape genetics."

RELATED: Kayla Itsines Shared the Most Relatable Instagram Story Ever About Her “Far From Perfect” Skin

Another person urged followers to stop comparing their bodies to Itsines' and respect that her journey looks different than theirs. "Kayla owes us absolutely nothing about her pregnancy journey," they wrote. "This is what she looks like post-baby. This IS her realistic image. It's disgusting the way some of you choose to attack her as if her current body isn’t 'bad' enough to make you feel better."

Postpartum bodies look different at every age, every ability, and every size—which Itsines has talked about in the past. 

"If I am honest, it is with great trepidation that I share with you this very personal image," she shared on Instagram in early May alongside a photo of her at one-week postpartum. “Every woman's journey through life but especially pregnancy, birth and healing post-birth is unique. While each journey has a common thread that connects us as women, our personal experience, our relationship with ourselves and our body will always be our own."

RELATED: What Kayla Itsines, the Tone It Up Girls, and Other Fitness Stars Do When They’re Not at the Gym

She added that she hopes all of her followers will embrace their bodies, rather than compare themselves to her. "As a personal trainer, all I can hope for you ladies is that you feel encouraged to do the same regardless of whether you have just given birth or not, celebrate your body and the gift that it is," she wrote. "No matter what journey you have been on with your body, the ways in which it heals, supports, strengthens and adapts to take us through life is truly incredible."

Contrary to popular belief, body-shaming comes in all forms. Even we at Shapesee comments saying the women we feature on our site and social media platforms are too fit, too big, too small, you name it. But it's not fair for anyperson to experience shaming (of any kind). Everyone is different, and therefore everyone's journeys will look different. Especially woman to woman, we should be empowering, not judging, each other.

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This article originally appeared on Shape.com