Post-harvest losses of fruits and vegetables in developing countries are mostly as a result of in proper storage facilities. While refrigerated cool-stores are the best method of preserving fruits and vegetables, they are expensive to buy and run. Consequently, in developing countries there is an interest in simple low-cost alternatives, many of which depends on evaporative cooling, which is si...

The aim of this chapter is to describe the presence of pesticide residues in fruits and vegetables, mainly how they are introduced, dissipated, degraded, affected by food processing techniques and their risk assessment. Fruits and vegetables are important components of the human diet since they provide essential nutrients that are required for most of the reactions occurring in the body. A high...

Values for the 'vitamin E' contents of some vegetables and fruits have been published, for example by Emmerie & Engel (1943) and Harris, Quaife & Swanson (1950). The values given by these and other authors may have been in error for various reasons. For example, neither seasonal fluctuation nor variation in anatomical distribution was fully recognized. Moreover, the analytical results obtained ...

Fig. 1. Wound ethylene production at 20C by tomato pericarp disks cut from the blossom, equator, and stem regions of mature green fruit. Data are means The physiology of lightly processed (LP) fruits and vegetables is essentially the physiology of wounded tissue. This type of processing, involving abrasion, peeling, slicing, chopping, or shredding, differs from traditional processing in that th...

Editorial Staff Assistant Managing Editor: Dawn Bennett Senior Editors: Eleanore Butz, R. Brooks Hanson, Pamela J. Hines, Barbara Jasny, Katrina L. Kelner, David Lindley, Linda J. Miller, Phillip D. Szuromi, David F. Voss Associate Editors: Gilbert J. Chin, Paula A. Kiberstis, Suki Parks, L. Bryan Ray Letters: Christine Gilbert, Editor; Steven S. Lapham Book Reviews: Katherine Livingston, Edito...

The current FDA method to recover parasites from fruits and vegetables is derived from procedures used to isolate parasitic protozoa from water. A 1kg portion of fruit or vegetable is divided into 200 g subportions. The subportions are sequentially processed in a sonic cleaning bath with 1.5 liters of detergent solution (1% sodium dodecyl sulfate, 0.1% Tween 80) and sonicated for 10 minutes. As...

O(6)-methylguanine DNA methyl-transferase (MGMT) is the only known critical gene involved in cellular defense against alkylating agents in the DNA direct reversal repair (DRR) pathway. Three single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) coding for non-conservative amino acid substitutions have been identified [C250T (Leu84Phe), A427G (Ile143Val) and A533G (Lys178Arg)]. To examine the importance of the D...

Tocopherol and tocotrienol contents of raw fruits and vegetables and processed products were determined by saponification and normal phase liquid chromatography. All samples were either locally obtained or collected as part of the US Department of Agriculture’s National Food and Nutrient Analysis Program (NFNAP). All fruits, vegetables and processed products were selected from the USDA Key Food...

INTRODUCTION Eating a diet high in fruits and vegetables as part of an overall healthful diet can help lower chronic disease risk and aid in weight management. Increasing the percentage of Americans who consume enough fruits and vegetables every day is part of the Healthy People 2010 objectives for the nation. Assessing trends in consumption of these foods is important for tracking public healt...