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Advances in chemotherapy have significantly increased the rate of survival among many common cancers, but these improvements in cancer treatment have also caused new side effects in patients that greatly affect their daily lives. One of the most common of these secondary side effects is chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment (CICI) also known colloquially in the medical community as “chemo brain.” CICI affects up to 78% of cancer patients who have received chemotherapy, and there are no current treatments available for the associated cognitive side effects. The consumption of anthocyanin-rich foods, such as blueberries, have showed particular promise in the area of improvement of cognitive health. The overall objective of this work was to develop and fully characterize two stable delivery vehicles for blueberry bioactives with regards to consumer acceptance, physicochemical properties, and bioactive delivery to use in future clinical studies looking at CICI. A secondary objective of this work was to directly examine how the inclusion of an anthocyanin-rich blueberry extract (BBEC) vs. a lyophilized whole fruit blueberry powder (BBPC) would affect consumer acceptance, physicochemical properties, and bioactive delivery of an equivalent functional food matrix, which would have useful applications in a broader sense of functional food product development.In this work, two functional gelatin confections were developed and found to be promising candidates for use in future CICI clinical trials because of their stability over one month of refrigerated storage. It was found that the main differences between including a whole blueberry powder vs. an anthocyanin-rich blueberry extract within an equivalent gelatin confection matrix were bioactive retention, gel strength, texture, and freezable water content, but with no significant differences seen in their consumer acceptability. BBPC was found to retain a significantly higher number of anthocyanins post- confection processing, produce a harder gel microstructure, require a one-day texture stabilization period, as well as contain a higher %FW when compared to the BBEC formula. BBPC and BBEC were compared in a dietary intervention where healthy men and women were fed a single equivalent acute dose and their 24-hour urine collected and analyzed. Results showed that participants complied with their 7-day low berry washout diets and that 0.05% of the anthocyanins the confections contained post processing and pre-ingestion were able to be seen in 24 hour urine. Importantly, it was also observed that there was not a significant difference in the anthocyanin delivery between BBEC and BBPC when controlling for inter-individual metabolic heterogeneity. There were also no differences seen in product acceptability between the BBEC and BBPC when tested in the clinical rather than the consumer setting.These studies show the importance of considering the bioactive source when developing functional food products for use in clinical studies. Furthermore, these studies demonstrate the potential to successfully develop two functional confections for the delivery of blueberry anthocyanins for future use in CICI and cognitive health clinical studies. Larger clinical studies in a CICI cohort is necessary to test the effectiveness of blueberry anthocyanins to mitigate cognitive symptoms associated with the disorder.

For many ethnic Americans, forming a cultural identity is a complicated and arduous endeavor. Entrenched in an environment in which mainstream ideologies leave ethnic practices and histories vulnerable to marginalization, accessing a clear picture of cultural origin is nearly impossible for groups that have undergone significant acculturation. As cultures clash, individuals find themselves suspended in a disorienting network of oppositional value systems. People positioned within this disorienting space often seek a firm cultural grounding. Barraged by a number of expectations from both their ethnic and the mainstream culture, minorities often experience a deep sense of displacement. Seeking to recover cultural roots in an effort to make sense of hybridized, ethnic identity becomes a negotiation process that many writers have recounted through autobiography. Zora Neale Hurston's Research, Leslie Marmon Silko's Yellow Woman, and Maxine Hong Kingston's White Tigers each conveys its author's process of drafting her own cultural orientation. Disenfranchised by their culturally hybridized communities, Hurston, an African American, Silko, an American Indian, and Kingston, a Chinese American, each uses the narrative process to reshape and re-envision her ethnic history. By modernizing, revising, and adopting ancient subjectivities, each writer positions herself within an ancient narrative framework. This novel recombination of historical myth, narrative, and performance empowers these women writers to construct their own cultural representations in a tenuous social climate.