Well before Safeway launched a line of organic products or Craigslist posted openings for school garden coordinators, UC Santa Cruz was training students for careers in organic farming.

The UC Santa Cruz Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture started in 1967 when the concept of organic was in its infancy. Forty-three years later, organic has gone mainstream and the apprenticeship program is more popular than ever.

A recently published study looking at the apprenticeship’s last 20 years found that a large percentage of its alumni are still involved in growing and marketing organic food and teaching...

Sixth-grade students from Hamasaki Elementary School in Los Angeles were surprised to learn that they could actually see iron in their breakfast cereal through a simple experiment involving ground up cereal, water and magnets. These same students also found out that learning about science could be fun.

The students were taking part in a celebration of 4-H National Youth Science Day at UC Cooperative Extension in Los Angeles County Sept. 24. LA County advisors and program coordinators teamed up to give the students the opportunity to learn about nutrition, physical activity and the environment through fun, interactive science-based activities. The students learned about the body’s need for iron in the diet, what types of foods...

Minimum-wage employees are more likely to be obese than those who earn higher wages, according to a new study by UC Davis public health researchers. The study is the latest in a growing body of evidence that shows being poor is a risk factor for unhealthy weight.

"Estimating the Effects of Wages on Obesity" was published in May 2010 in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. The authors, DaeHwan Kim and John Paul Leigh, identified several possible reasons why lower wages could support the tendency to be obese:

• Poorer people tend to live in less-safe neighborhoods with...

UC Cooperative Extension nutrition educators have discovered that, when it comes to teaching consumers how to eat right, a picture is worth of thousand words.

“We’ve been teaching people for years about MyPyramid and the dietary guidelines, serving sizes and the number of servings they should eat, but many were having a hard time translating that to what exactly to put on their plates,” said Cathi Lamp, the nutrition, family and consumer sciences advisor for Tulare County UCCE.

In an effort to simplify nutrition education, UCCE started with a graphic of a plate, with half designated for fruits and vegetables and a quarter...

At 925 million, the number of hungry people in the world is unacceptably high.

To combat world hunger, many scientists are working on developing crops that can resist disease and withstand the elements, from drought to floods. One such scientist is Sean Cutler at UC Riverside, whose breakthrough discovery last year of pyrabactin has brought drought-tolerant crops closer to becoming reality and spawned new research in several labs around the world.