Tell-tale Landscapes and Mythical Chronotopes in Urban Designs for Twenty-first Century Paris

In their article Tell-tale Landscapes and Mythical Chronotopes in Urban Designs for Twenty-first Century Paris Bart Keunen and Sofie Verraest outline a methodology for the examination of narrative structures projected onto landscapes and exemplify it by analyzing four urbanist projects submitted for the international workshop for Greater Paris launched by President of France Nicholas Sarkozy in 2009. Keunen and Verraest focus on phantasmagorical urban spaces considered to be profane remnants of what Ernst Cassirer referred to as mythical thought. Since the spatiotemporal structure of these phantasmagorical places is understood as fundamental to their affective appeal and seductiveness, they are treated as Bakhtinian chronotopes. Four chronotopes — the oasis, the capsule, the hub, and the bazaar — are thus exposed as the cornerstones of urbanists\u27 rhetoric strategies

Impact of bread making on fructan chain integrity and effect of fructan enriched breads on breath hydrogen, satiety, energy intake, PYY and ghrelin

Recently, there has been considerable interest in the satiety inducing properties of inulin type fructans (ITF) as a tool for weight management. As a staple food, breads provide an excellent vehicle for ITF supplementation however the integrity of the ITF chains and properties upon bread making need to be assessed. Breads enriched with 12% fructooligosaccharides (FOS) and 12% inulin were baked and the degree of polymerisation of fructans extracted from the breads were compared to those of pure compounds. An acute feeding study with a single blind cross-over design was conducted with 11 participants to investigate the effect of ITF enriched breads on breath hydrogen, self-reported satiety levels, active ghrelin, total PYY and energy intake. Size exclusion chromatography indicated that little or no depolymerisation of inulin occurred during bread making, however, there was evidence of modest FOS depolymerisation. Additionally, ITF enriched breads resulted in increased concentrations of exhaled hydrogen although statistical significance was reached only for the inulin enriched bread (p=0.001). There were no significant differences between bread types in reported satiety (p=0.129), plasma active ghrelin (p=0.684), plasma PYY (p=0.793) and energy intake (p=0.240). These preliminary results indicate that inulin enriched bread may be a suitable staple food to increase ITF intake. Longer intervention trials are required to assess the impact of inulin enriched breads on energy intake and body weight