Volume 14, Issue 2, 2026

Nowadays, the worldwide market includes a wide variety of sweets with processed sugar. The food industry has been developing alternatives based on health products. This study aimed to formulate alternative, highly-nutritional date-based sweets filled with cooked pulses and sweetened with date products without using processed sugar. Different cooked pulses (red cowpea, soybean, and chickpea seeds) sweetened with date powder or date syrup (dips) were used to prepare alternative date sweets. They were exposed to physicochemical and microbiological analyses and sensory evaluation. Adding pulses to the pulse-date sweet samples significantly raised their contents of protein, fats, crude fibers, total sugars, calcium, iron, and zinc, as well as caloric values, lightness, and water activity. Compared to the control (date paste mixed with dark chocolate), the sweets with cooked pulses had lower contents of ash, carbohydrates, phenolics, and caffeine, as well as lower antioxidant activity and hardness values. Following storage for three months, the water activity and microbiological counts slightly declined. The date sweets filled with cooked pulses had high sensory acceptability. The samples containing cooked red cowpeas and chickpeas were the most acceptable, while those sweetened with date powder had maximum antioxidant activity. Our study revealed that enriching date sweets with cooked pulses increases their nutritional value without involving processed sugar in the final product.

An effective and timely prevention of diseases in animal companions is a major task faced by the modern veterinary science. This research featured the correlation between malignant neoplasms and ophthalmological diseases in cats. The authors studied the multifactorial effect on the neoplastic proliferation and cancer-related ophthalmopathy to develop a general scheme of neoplastic proliferation in cats.
The effect of exogenous and endogenous factors on neoplastic proliferation was described based on experimental studies of numerous samples taken from 192 cats, including 67 cancer patients. The comprehensive methodological approach included anamnestic data sampling, clinical examination, examination of the pathological area, hematology, cytomorphology, and chemical-toxicological tests.
The cats with various ophthalmopathies were simultaneously diagnosed with one or more of the following cancer types: carcinoma (37.13%), squamous cell carcinoma (32.83%), lymphoma (29.85%), sarcoma (20.89%), melanoma (2.98%), and mastocytoma (1.49%).
The main factors of neoplastic proliferation included diet, care, living conditions, physical activity, stress, chronic inflammation, repeated cases, the rate of increase/decrease in clinical signs, previous therapies, etc. In most cases, the cancer-related ophthalmopathy developed as a result of tumor metabolites or as a side-effect of chemotherapy. The incidence of cancer-related ophthalmopathy increased with age.
Cancer was found to correlate with the amounts of zinc, iron, and lead in the fur. Another correlation occurred between carcinomas, especially mammary tumors, and the high copper content in the fur.