CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — From tweeting photos of delicious meals to reviewing restaurants, social media give foodies numerous opportunities to indulge their passion for edibles. But these media and other digital communications — including recipe websites and food-delivery apps — also generate a rich trove of text data for food scientists and food industry researchers to study what people eat, how nutrition affects health and many other food-related topics. Read more from Illinois News Bureau.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Faculty and staff members and graduate teaching assistants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this spring were honored for excellence in teaching, mentoring and advising, collectively known as Campus Awards for Excellence in Instruction. Read more.

A global team of more than 500 researchers, including many experts in smell and taste perception, is investigating the abrupt loss of smell and taste – called anosmia and hypogeusia, respectively – in association with COVID-19 and whether these symptoms could help predict patients who may have the disease and could be at risk of being contagious.

Read more from the Illinois News Bureau.

URBANA, Ill. – The Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) was awarded a $335,005 grant from the Agricultural Transformation Initiative (ATI) to address malnutrition in Malawi. SIL’s nutrition team is housed in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.

URBANA, Ill. — A diet including daily avocado consumption improves the ability to focus attention in adults whose measurements of height and weight are categorized as overweight or obese, a new randomized control trial found. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted the 12-week study, published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology. Read more.

URBANA, Ill. — Being distracted by technology during mealtime may decrease the amount of food a person eats, nutrition scientists suggest in a new study.

When 119 young adults consumed a meal while playing a simple computer game for 15 minutes, they ate significantly less than when they ate the same meal without distractions, said lead author Carli A. Liguori.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose provide the seductive taste of sweetness without the calories contained in sugar – a seeming win-win for people who need to control their blood sugar and insulin levels or weight.

However, simply tasting or consuming sucralose may affect blood glucose and insulin levels on glucose tolerance tests, scientists at the University of Illinois found in a new study.

Read more from the Illinois News Bureau.

As a result of intersecting research interests in women’s health, a new collaboration was forged between Zeynep Madak-Erdogan (GSP/ONC-PM), Assistant Professor in Food Science and Human Nutrition, and Justina Zurauskiene (ONC-PM), Birmingham-Illinois Partnership for Discovery, Engagement and Education (BRIDGE) fellow and fellow at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences in Birmingham, England.

URBANA, Ill. — A new study in rats suggests that caffeine may offset some of the negative effects of an obesogenic diet by reducing the storage of lipids in fat cells and limiting weight gain and the production of triglycerides. Read more from the Illinois News Bureau.

URBANA, Ill. — At least 90% of head and neck cancer patients develop symptoms that affect their ability or desire to eat, because of either the tumor itself or the surgery or radiation used to treat it. These problems, called nutrition impact symptoms, have wide-ranging negative effects on patients’ physical and mental health and quality of life.