In the 1980s, a combination of forces came together to convince the public that food products containing tropical oils contributed to their risk of coronary heart disease. Tropical oils were competing with the U.S. soy bean oil market as an alternative vegetable oil, yet they were higher in saturated fat, which had become the target of the health promotion community for its theoretical associat...

As part of a trend toward healthy convenience foods, ready-to-eat (RTE) mixed-ingredient salads have become popular products among consumers. A mixed-ingredient salad contains combinations of raw (e.g. leafy vegetables and tomatoes) and processed (e.g. chicken, salmon, ham, pasta and couscous) ingredients. Contamination of leafy vegetables can occur during any step in the production chain and, ...

Executive Summary The Food-borne trematodiases (FBTs) represent a major group of the neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) – more than 40 million people are infected with one or more of the FBTs, and 750 million (>10% of the world’s population) others worldwide remain at risk on contracting FBTs. Over 100 species of food-borne trematodes are known to infect humans, although only several are respon...

Increasing food production and mitigating climate change are two primary but seemingly contradictory objectives for tropical landscapes. This special feature examines synergies and trade-offs among these objectives. Four themes emerge from the papers: the important roles of both forest and agriculture sectors for climate mitigation in tropical countries; the minor contribution from deforestatio...

Tropical rivers and their associated floodplain habitats are dynamic habitat mosaics to which fishes are challenged to respond in an adaptive manner. Migratory fishes create linkages among food webs that are partitioned along a nested hierarchy of spatial scales. Such linkages are examined across a hierarchy of spatio-temporal scales, ranging from small streams to entire drainage basins, for ri...

Tropical wet forests are commonly perceived as stable and constant environments. However, many rain forest organisms reproduce seasonally. To understand the proximate regulation of life history events in tropical organisms, we asked three questions: (1) How predictable are seasonal changes in the tropical rain forest? (2) Can tropical organisms anticipate environmental seasonality, despite the ...

About a quarter of the world's food production is lost after harvesting, even though a number of food preservation methods are readily available. Losses occur especially in the tropical regions where most developing countries are situated: perhaps because the available food preservation technologies do not function efficiently in such environments, or because they do not lend themselves to the ...