Peach Upside-Down Cake Recipe, Spotlight on Parchment Paper, Why Your Brain Sends Mixed Messages About Hunger, and Movement Over Meds for Insomnia

There’s nothing quite like juicy ripe peaches at the height of summer…unless it’s combining them with my other love, tender olive oil cake. This twist on pineapple upside-down cake makes a spectacular dessert or breakfast cake for your next brunch. I’m also sharing two intriguing studies that could help people address common concerns: overeating and insomnia. 

Peach Upside-Down Cake

• Peach Upside-Down Cake

  Juicy peaches and tender olive oil-based vanilla cake make the perfect summertime sweet treat. Feel free to get as artful as you’d like with the peach arrangement, but there’s no need to peel them.

  Ingredients

  For the peaches:

  • 4 medium peaches (more if needed)
  • 1/2 lemon
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar

  For the batter:

  • 3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for the pan
  • 1-1/2 cups cake flour
  • 1/2 cup white or golden whole wheat flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3/4 cup Greek yogurt
  • 3/4 cup ricotta cheese
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla

  For serving:

  • Vanilla ice cream or fresh whipped cream (optional)

  Directions

  Step 1

  Halve the peaches and slice each half into thin wedges. Place in a large bowl and squeeze on the juice from the lemon half, then toss with the brown sugar. 

  Step 2

  Preheat your oven to 350°F. Lightly brush the bottom and sides of a 9″ springform pan with olive oil, line with parchment paper, and lightly brush the parchment with olive oil. Starting from the outer rim, arrange the peaches in concentric circles on the bottom of the pan; set aside. 

  Step 3

  In a medium bowl, whisk together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside. 

  Step 4

  Beat the eggs and sugar until thick and light yellow in color (if you have a stand mixer, use the paddle attachment for all the mixing). Slowly add the 3/4 cup olive oil, yogurt, ricotta, and vanilla. On the lowest speed, add the flour mixture and beat only until incorporated, scraping down the bowl as needed. 

  Step 5

  Carefully pour the batter over the peaches and use an offset spatula to smooth the top. Bake for about 60 minutes, until the cake is golden and firm to the touch and the blade of a sharp knife inserted in the center comes out clean (start testing after about 45 minutes). Let cool on a rack for 15 minutes, then carefully run an offset spatula around the pan ring, then take off the ring. Place a 10″ or 12″ serving dish over the cake and invert it. Lift off the pan bottom and gently peel away the parchment. Serve warm or at room temperature with ice cream or cold with whipped cream if desired.

  Yields 10 servings

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight

Parchment Paper

While not an edible ingredient, parchment is integral to numerous recipes, from baked goods to roasted vegetables. When many of us grew up, foil was the go-to for lining pans, but we now know that some of its metal can leech into foods. What’s more, foil needed oiling to keep food from sticking. I love parchment because it’s safer, plus it already has nonstick properties and can be used for cooking methods up to 400 or 450°F (check the label information before buying).

Foil remains a great way to line a rimmed sheet pan when you’ll be elevating food with a rack, like a V-shaped one for roasting a turkey or a flat woven one for making bacon—easy-peasy cleanup.

Quick Kitchen Nugget

Prepping with Parchment

It can be confusing: You use parchment to avoid sticking, yet some cake recipes say to oil or butter the pan and the paper. What gives? Lightly prepping the pan before placing the parchment gives the paper an anchor so it won’t slip out of place when you add batter, for instance. Oiling the paper makes it that much easier to peel it off after cooking. This is especially important with an upside-down cake because you’re trying to keep the fruit pattern intact. It also helps when making layer cakes—you want each layer to be as smooth and uniform as possible, without any nicks that could mar the finish.

For Your Best Health

Why Your Brain Sends Mixed Messages About Hunger 

A team of scientists from University of Southern California (USC) has identified specialized neurons in the brain that store meal memories, encoding not just what food was eaten but when it was eaten to help the brain remember eating times and foods and regulate eating behavior by communicating with hunger-related areas of the brain. When these memory traces are disrupted, we’re more likely to overeat because we can’t recall recent meals, like the lunch we ate just a few hours earlier, triggering excessive hunger and leading to disordered eating. The research, published in Nature Communications, not only uncovered a critical neural mechanism but could also lead to new strategies for treating obesity by enhancing memory around food consumption.

During eating, neurons in the ventral hippocampus region of the brain become active and form what the team of researchers called “meal engrams”—specialized memory traces that store information about the experience of food consumption. “An engram is the physical trace that a memory leaves behind in the brain,” said Scott Kanoski, PhD, professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and corresponding author of the study. While scientists have long studied engrams for their role in storing memories and other experiences in the brain, the new study identified engrams dedicated to meal experiences.

“Meal engrams function like sophisticated biological databases that store multiple types of information such as where you were eating as well as the time that you ate,” added Dr. Kanoski.

To reach their findings, the research team used advanced neuroscience techniques to observe the brain activity of laboratory rats as they ate, providing the first real-time view of how meal memories form. The meal memory neurons are distinct from brain cells involved in other types of memory formation. When researchers selectively destroyed these neurons, lab rats showed impaired memory for food locations but retained normal spatial memory for non-food-related tasks, indicating a specialized system dedicated to meal-related information processing. The study revealed that meal memory neurons communicate with the lateral hypothalamus, a brain region long known to control hunger and eating behavior. When this hippocampus-hypothalamus connection was blocked, the lab rats overate and could not remember where meals were consumed.

Dr. Kanoski said it can be assumed that a human’s brain would undergo a similar phenomenon. When someone’s attention is focused elsewhere, like on a phone or television screen, these critical encoding moments are compromised. “The brain fails to properly catalog the meal experience,” said Lea Decarie-Spain, PhD, postdoctoral scholar at USC Dornsife and the study’s first author, “leading to weak or incomplete meal engrams.”

The discovery has immediate relevance for understanding human eating disorders. People with memory impairments, like dementia or brain injuries that affect memory formation, may often consume multiple meals in quick succession because they cannot remember eating. Distracted eating, like mindlessly snacking while watching television or scrolling on your phone, may impair meal memories and contribute to overconsumption.

Dr. Kanoski said the findings could eventually inform new clinical approaches for treating obesity and weight management. Current weight management strategies often focus on restricting food intake or increasing exercise, but the new research suggests that enhancing meal memory formation could be equally important. “We’re finally beginning to understand that remembering what and when you ate is just as crucial for healthy eating as the food choices themselves,” he said.

Fitness Flash

Movement Over Meds for Insomnia

Having trouble sleeping? According to a large analysis comparing various treatments completed by Asian scientists and published in the online journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, yoga, Tai Chi, walking, and jogging may be some of the best natural remedies for improving sleep and tackling insomnia.

Characterized by difficulties falling and staying asleep along with early morning awakening, the prevalence of insomnia ranges from 4% to 22% of the population, noted the researchers. It is associated with heightened risks of various mental and physical health conditions, including dementia and cardiovascular disease. Drug treatments for insomnia are not without their side effects, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), while effective, isn’t always available due to the shortage of trained therapists.

An emerging body of research has suggested that exercise is helpful, but current guidelines don’t specify which types of exercise might be most beneficial. The researchers set out to plug this knowledge gap. They scoured research databases for relevant randomized clinical trials published up to April 2025 and included 22 in a network meta-analysis, a statistical technique used to simultaneously compare multiple interventions.

The trials totaled 1,348 participants and 13 different treatment approaches to ease insomnia, seven of which were exercise-based: yoga, Tai Chi, walking or jogging, aerobic plus strength exercise, strength training alone, aerobic exercise combined with therapy, and mixed aerobic exercises. These programs ranged from 4 to 26 weeks in length. The other approaches included CBT, sleep hygiene, Ayurveda, acupuncture/massage, nothing, and existing treatment, such as usual care and/or lifestyle changes with durations ranging from 6 to 26 weeks. Validated scoring systems for sleep quality and insomnia severity, as well as subjective and objective measures of total sleep time, sleep efficiency (percentage of time spent asleep while in bed), number of awakenings after going to sleep, and time taken to fall asleep (sleep latency) were used to assess sleep patterns.

Compared with existing treatment, CBT is likely to result in a large increase in total sleep time based on subjective sleep diary data. It may also improve sleep efficiency and shorten the amount of time spent awake after falling asleep, as well as sleep latency, with sustained improvements, the findings suggest. But some of the exercise-based interventions also seemed to be effective when compared with existing treatments.

Yoga may potentially lead to an increase in total sleep time of nearly two hours and may improve sleep efficiency by nearly 15%. It may also reduce the amount of time spent awake after falling asleep by nearly an hour and shorten sleep latency by around half an hour.

Walking or jogging may result in a large reduction in insomnia severity of nearly 10 points, while Tai Chi may reduce poor sleep-quality scores by more than four points, increase total sleep time by more than 50 minutes, and reduce time spent awake after falling asleep by over half an hour. It may also shorten sleep latency by around 25 minutes. Further in-depth analyses revealed that Tai Chi performed significantly better on all subjectively and objectively assessed outcomes than existing treatments for up to two years.

There are potentially plausible biological explanations for the findings, said the researchers. With its focus on body awareness, controlled breathing, and attentional training, yoga may alter brain activity, thereby alleviating anxiety and depressive symptoms that often interfere with a good night’s sleep. Tai Chi emphasizes breath control and physical relaxation and has been shown to decrease sympathetic nervous system activity, dampening down hyperarousal. Its combination of meditative movement and mindfulness may promote emotional regulation, deactivate mental chatter, and reduce anxiety. It may also help curb the production of inflammatory chemicals over longer periods. Walking or jogging may improve sleep by increasing energy expenditure, curbing cortisol production, improving emotional regulation, boosting secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin, and enhancing the amount of deep sleep.

The researchers acknowledged that 15 of the included trials contained design and methodological flaws. And there were no standardized, quantifiable metrics for the frequency or intensity of exercise interventions, while the sample sizes of some of the studies were small. Nevertheless, they concluded, “The findings of this study further underscore the therapeutic potential of exercise interventions in the treatment of insomnia, suggesting that their role may extend beyond adjunctive support to serve as viable primary treatment options…Given the advantages of exercise modalities such as yoga, Tai Chi, and walking or jogging—including low cost, minimal side effects, and high accessibility—these interventions are well suited for integration into primary care and community health programs.”

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