Japan explores the boundary between food and medicine Tokyo & London. Japan's leading cosmetics manufacturer Shiseido is now marketing rice as a health product. This is the first step by Japanese industry to create a new market for foods engineered to have special medical benefits. Last month, Shiseido became the first company in Japan to win approval from the Ministry of Health and Welfare to sell a "physiologically functional food", defined by new legislation introduced last September. Shiseido' s product consists ofrice from which the protein globulin has been removed for the benefit of those allergic to it. For unexplained reasons, allergy to rice has become common in Japan, afflicting thousands of people young and old. The allergy causes unsightly red lesions on the skin covering large areas of the body. The present cure, the avoidance of rice and its products (including sake) in the diet is not welcomed by the Japanese. Shiseido' s engineered rice is one of many products being developed by hundreds of companies expecting to create a new niche in Japan's huge food market. Basic research in the field by university researchers is being supported by a large grant from the Mini stry of Education, Science and Culture (MESC). Shiseido's rice is produced with an enzyme that removes the allergen while retaining 80 per cent of the nutritious rice seed protein. Reconstituted rice is given a glossy surface; its developers claim that its taste is that of ordinary rice and that it prevents allergy in about 70 per cent of patients. Another newly approved product is low
A group of Brazilian researchers has been taken aback by the announcement by US dentists of the discovery of a new facial muscle, because they described it themselves in a local journal in 1978. Gary Hack, assistant professor of dentistry at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, and Gwendolyn Dunn, an orthodontist, say they discovered the muscle, involved with mastication, because they opted for an unusual way of dissecting the face, carving not from the traditional direction, from the side of the head, but from the front (see Nature Medicine 2, 506; 1996). The 'undiscovered' muscle was found to run from behind the eye socket to the lower jaw. Hack and Dunn went on to dissect other heads and to scan the scientific literature to find whether the muscle had already been described. They waited a year before making their announcement. "We reviewed 15 textbooks," says Hack, without finding the muscle. The Americans called the muscle sphenomandibularis, as it begins at the sphenoid and has an insertion point at the mandible. If correct, this would be the fifth muscle involved with mastication. But when the announcement was reported by the media, it came to the attention of Luis Roberto de Toledo Ramalho, a Brazilian researcher at the Faculty of Dentistry at UNESP (Sao Paulo State University) at Araraquara. Toledo immediately remembered an
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