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While the scientific reaction to many of the claims made for the benefits of dietary fibre is ‘it's too good to be true’, there is wide acceptance by the general public and the media that an increased intake of dietary fibre is a good thing. There is, however, still confusion about what dietary fibre is and how much there is in foods and the diet. In this, the first of two articles, Professor D.A.T. Southgate and Richard Faulks, of the AFRC Institute of Food Research, Norwich attempt to answer the basic question, what is dietary fibre?

During the last 30 years there have been many and dramatic changes to the pattern of potato production and distribution in the UK. Varieties and cultural techniques have changed and so, too, have post‐harvest handling, storage, marketing and distribution. Any or all of these might have had an effect on the nutritional value of the potato but whether this was so was not known until a two‐year nutritional evaluation of retail potatoes in the UK was recently completed. This work was financed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and carried out by Paul Finglas and Richard Faulks at the Food Research Institute, Norwich.

Evaluating the hypothesis that dietary fibre is a protective factor and interpretation of the nutritional advice to ‘eat more fibre’ is dependent on quantitative measurements of dietary fibre. The analysis poses several very difficult analytical issues. Firstly there are the technical issues which arise whenever one analyses a complex mixture, especially of carbohydrates. Secondly, because different components exert different physiological effects, there is a need to characterise as well as quantify the dietary fibre if one wishes to understand or predict its effects; and thirdly, the definition of dietary fibre is couched in physiological terms that do not lend themselves to translation into analytical procedures.

When the potato gained popular acceptance as a food item in the UK about 200 years ago it quickly became, and has remained, a major component of the diet. The reasons for its popularity are both agronomic and culinary. The potato is easily cultivated in our temperate climate and gives good yields even if harvested immature in summer, as often happened, to fill the gap between cereal harvests. The potato has a natural dormant period which allows it to be stored through the winter months when other fresh vegetables are in short supply. It lends itself readily to a wide range of cooking methods of which the most common are chipped, boiled, mashed, roast and baked, although it can also be made into flour and used to replace or extend wheat flour in certain baked foods. So well established has the potato become that it is now difficult to envisage a hot cooked meal without potatoes — despite the popularity and convenience of pastas and rice.

Modern food processing methods and the widespread ownership of both domestic and catering microwave ovens have permitted rapid growth in the production of a wide range of frozen and cook‐chill foods for retail and catering use.

The texture of cooked potato is an amalgam of those physical characteristics perceived during preparation and consumption. They may range from a visual assessment of disintegration and flouriness, hardness or crispness, physical work needed to mash, cut, or penetrate with a fork, through to the more subtle sensations of bite, smoothness or graininess sensed in the mouth. Different criteria for the assessment of textural quality will be applied to different cooked potato products, such as boiled, mashed, chipped, roast or baked potatoes, and it is therefore important to understand the underlying physical, compositional and chemical properties of the tuber and how they contribute to the production of textural attributes.

Notes that of 600 carotenoids found in nature, only 40 are regularly consumed by humans. Looks at the biological functions of carotenoids. Reports on studies with regard to the effects on health carotenoid‐rich diets.

June 22,1972 Damages — Remoteness — Negligence — Economic loss — Contractors damaging cable supplying electricity to factory — Physical damage to metal in factory's furnace as result of power cut — Loss of profit from “melt” and from further melts which would have taken place if no power cut — Whether economic loss recoverable — Whether economic loss attaching to physical loss recoverable — Doctrine of parasitic damages.

The touted benefits of inter-governmental contracting are cost savings and simplicity when compared to shared service agreements. Some managers and public officials resist contracting given the assumption that there may be a drop-off in service quality. However, inter-governmental contracting introduces market forces which theoretically would improve performance while keeping costs per unit of output low (Boyne, 1998). This paperexamines municipal police contracting in the State of New Jersey, the purpose of which is to determine if there are statistically significant differences in non-violent crime rates among municipalities that maintain their own police force versus those that contract with neighboring municipalities for police services. Contracting costs are also explored. While summary statistics indicate lower non-violent crime rates among municipalities that maintain their own police force compared to those that contract for police services, multiple regression results indicate that contracting does not predict higher non-violent crime rates at the .05 level. Therefore, contracting for police services should be explored as an alternative municipal policing model.