Telling porkies

Can the measured quality in one part of a pig predict quality in the rest of it? What is the true variability in pork quality out there and what's causing it?

A team of researchers from University of Illinois College of Agricultural Consumer and Environmental Sciences, USDA and Smithfield Foods recently tested nearly 8000 commercially raised pigs to find the answers.

The team looked at correlations between loin quality and quality of the belly and ham from the same pig, with quality defined mostly by colour and tenderness. No correlation between loin quality and the quality of other cuts could be established. So a good loin doesn’t mean great bacon and ham.

The researchers also looked at understanding how much variability exists in pork products and where it comes from. They looked at every possible aspect of pork quality and tried to pinpoint the major sources of variability in the dataset — including season, production focus, marketing group and sex — as well as variation within individual animals. In the end, those individual differences accounted for the largest portion of the variability.

Finding that the majority of the variability was within individual pigs and not in any particular management practice is good news for producers but doesn’t help food professionals in their quest for quality and consistency.

The research has been published over five articles in the Journal of Animal Science.

Read more about it via http://bit.ly/2oTDAWk

Beware the wrapper

Perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs), present in many fast-food wrapping papers, can now be tracked when they enter the body. In a recent study of more than 400 packaging materials, 46% of food contact papers were contaminated with PFASs. Previous studies have shown that PFASs can migrate from the packaging, contaminate the food and then accumulate in the body.

Known to be harmful to the human body, PFASs are often used in stain-resistant products, firefighting materials and non-stick cookware, and are not meant for ingestion. Diseases including kidney and testicular cancers, thyroid disease, low birth weight, immunotoxicity in children and other health issues have been linked to PFASs in previous studies.

Research teams from the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Medicine and the University of Notre Dame have developed a method whereby radiolabels are attached to three forms of the PFASs, enabling the scientists to follow the fate of these chemicals after ingestion.

The novelty of the newly designed method is that one of the fluorine atoms on the PFAS molecule was replaced with a radioactive form of fluorine (fluorine-18) — the same radioisotope that is used for medical positron emission tomography scans in hospitals around the world.

“For the first time, we have a PFAS tracer or chemical that we have tagged to see where it goes in mice,” said Suzanne Lapi, PhD, senior author of the study published in the Journal of Environment Science and Technology. “Each of the tracers exhibited some degree of uptake in all of the organs and tissues of interest that were tested, including the brain. The highest uptake was observed in the liver and stomach, and similar amounts were observed in the femur and lungs.”

Now that it appears likely that any PFASs that can be synthesised and isolated could be radiolabelled and used to directly measure uptake and biodistribution kinetics in biological systems, it opens the possibility of directly measuring uptake in human volunteers.

“This is possible since trace amounts of the compounds are easily measurable and the radioactivity short-lived,” said Graham Peaslee, PhD, the study co-author and professor of experimental nuclear physics in the College of Science at the University of Notre Dame. “It’s an important discovery because PFASs are a really persistent chemical that, once in the bloodstream, stays there and accumulates, which is not good.”

Now that researchers have identified which PFASs initially accumulate — and in which specific organs — and with some surprising differences, the authors say there are health implications far beyond this initial study.

“There was concern that these chemicals might directly enter the food that was wrapped with treated packaging,” said Peaslee, who used particle-induced gamma-ray emission to make the findings. “A larger concern is that, because these chemicals persist for a long time in the environment, when the treated consumer products enter the landfill, these chemicals will re-emerge into our drinking water. These overall results already call into question the safety of these alternative shorter-chain PFAS compounds.”

Lapi said the novel new tool developed by the research teams can be used for studying PFAS behaviour in environmental remediation studies to measure the fate of radiolabelled compounds in environmental treatment systems.

“This is a tremendous first step,” Lapi said, “and it underscores the need for further studies to aggressively investigate different PFAS compounds in different biological and environmental systems to assess the full impact of this novel radiosynthetic method.”

In addition to kidney and testicular cancer, scientists have previously found high cholesterol, thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension and ulcerative colitis to be correlated to the amount of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, found in the blood of people who were exposed to the tainted water.

As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency and US manufacturers reached a compromise to voluntarily remove two specific long-chain PFAS from the US market by 2015 — including PFOA. However, industry has switched from these long-chain forms of PFAS to shorter-chained versions of the same chemicals, Peaslee says. There is no toxicology data available for most of the alternative short-chain PFAS compounds used commercially.

Read more about it via http://bit.ly/2oTT5On

Rescued-food supermarket opens — take what you need, give if you can

Is the gut or the brain running the show?

We’ve known for a while that the combination of nutrients and the microbiome impact health — but now new research has taken this concept further, suggesting that microbes might also be able to control behaviour.

In a study led by Portugal’s Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, conducted in collaboration with Monash University, scientists conducted experiments on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in order to dissect how the complex interaction of diet and microbes affects food preference. The results were published in the journal PLOS Biology.

The scientists initially showed that flies deprived of amino acids showed decreased fertility and increased preference for protein-rich food. Indeed, the team found that the removal of any single essential amino acid was sufficient to increase the flies’ appetite for protein-rich food.

The scientists next tested the impact on food choices of five different species of bacteria that are naturally present in the guts of fruit flies in the wild. The results exceeded the scientists’ expectations: two specific bacterial species could abolish the increased appetite for protein in flies that were fed food lacking essential amino acids.

“With the right microbiome, fruit flies are able to face these unfavourable nutritional situations,” said Zita Carvalho-Santos from the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.

So exactly how could these bacteria act on the brain to alter appetite?

“Our first hypothesis was that these bacteria might be providing the flies with the missing essential amino acids,” noted Santos; however, the experiments did not support this hypothesis. Instead, Santos said, the gut bacteria “seem to induce some metabolic change that acts directly on the brain and the body, which mimics a state of protein satiety”.

So not only do gut bacteria appear to have an influence on the brain, but this influence occurs through a new and previously unknown mechanism. And with human beings playing host to hundreds of bacterial species, as opposed to the fruit fly’s five, it can be assumed that such influence is taking place on an even greater scale.

Read more about it via http://bit.ly/2pChCX8

Selecting the right heat exchanger for your food processing needs

Dearer means gooder

Consumers are so convinced that healthy food is more expensive than cheap food that they simply do not believe that food is healthy unless it costs more. Not only that, it was found that when presented with an unfamiliar ingredient claimed to offer health benefits the consumers only thought the health benefit was of interest if the ingredient was expensive.

So it seems that the price of food alone can impact our perceptions of what is healthy and even what health issues we should be concerned about.

This does mean that marketers can charge more for products that are touted as healthy if they want to maximise sales.

Rebecca Reczek from the Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business conducted the study with Kelly Haws of Vanderbilt University and Kevin Sample of the University of Georgia. Their results appear online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Read more about it via http://bit.ly/2pC7eP8

Amarock colour-coded crimped caps

The 21″ Amarock crimped cap is a lightweight and comfortable polypropylene cap designed to contain head hair, protecting product from possible contamination. The crimped cap ensures a more secure fit. It comes in a range of colours: red, blue, yellow, green, dark blue, white, pink and black.

Colour-coding is an effective way to minimise cross-contamination and other hazards within a processing facility. Although it is not yet a requirement, colour-coding can demonstrate a company’s dedication to the quality and consistency of their products. From beverage to dairy, pharmaceutical to food processing, colour-coding helps maintain a high level of safety for both employees and end consumers.

Read more about it via http://bit.ly/2qsak6r