Phosphorus and food's future

James Elser, Ph.D.

What can we do about phosphorus and food's future?

The 15th element in the periodic table is not something that comes to mind for most people when they reflect on causes of global food crises of the past. Overpopulation, climate change, crop disease, and soil erosion are more likely to deemed as the instigators of disaster scenarios.

However, phosphorus is essential for every living thing on this planet and, according to estimates, the world's phosphorous -- needed for fertilizing plants -- will peak within half a century.

It turns out there's so much biological demand for phosphorus that it's a limiting factor for life on this planet. The critical nature of phosphorus for the future of crops was well emphasized when Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt was president, but lately government leadership has yet to bring more awareness to the problem of dwindling supplies.

James Elser, Ph.D., hopes that will change.

"That's my dream, that President Obama will say the word 'phosphorus.'" he said, jokingly (or maybe not so much).

Elser, who as a child once wished to become a priest, is on a lifelong journey to save humankind from an entirely different, serious calamity: soaring food prices and widespread world hunger because of phosphorus unavailability.

Gale Prince: "Food safety is a journey"

Gale Prince

Food safety pioneer Gale Prince, the "Dean of safety recalls," addressed a room full of food scientists at our local Cactus International Food Technologists (Cactus IFT) chapter dinner at the Fiesta Resort conference center in Tempe, Arizona. He spoke about food recall trends, how to enhance food safety progam, and gave us some details on the proposed FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.

He began his talk by introducing us to the growing number of recalls in the United States. "Food safety has become a frequent topic for the media," he said. If you look at a 20-year trend, reccalls at retail have increased exponentially. Gail shared a graph of the trend and also details a few examples he's been involved with over the years.

The USDA has had a number of meat recalls, which Prince shows us picks up during the summer months of May through August. He says it is partly due to people cooking outside (such as at 4th of July) on the grill, who often leave their meat out or undercook their meat.

When you look at all the recalls of FDA, you also see the recalls going up, Prince said. He showed us a graph that showed that there were ove 8,000 just in the last year.

From 2004 to 2009 looking at class of recalls, most were class 1 due to salmonella problems. "Salmonella is a real challenge," Prince said.

There are three instances that accounted for 55 percent of food recalls in 2009.

- peanut paste
- powdered milk
- pistachios

Of all the recalls:

- 10 percent did not have a code - "this is like suicide for a company," Prince said.
- 51 percent involved multiple codes

Major Contributors

The major issues that generated recalls in 2009 were due to microbiological problems, allergens, mislabeling, foreign material (mainly plastic), chemical contamination, and inadequate processing.

Prince gave some advice in each of these areas. He tells the story of how Chinese honey is sometimes tainted with an antibiotic that is not allowed in the United States. The Chinese know that so they send to a different country to be relabeled as coming from that country.

Do recalls always happen late Friday afternoon? He has a theory that this is because manufacturers procrastinate to do it until the end of the week, which is a nightmare for the retailer. In addition, if you are a public company you need to inform the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) befoe you do the product recall, so companies often wait until thd market closes on Friday to do it.

New food vehicles identified in multistate outbreaks since 2006 are surprising like salmonella peanut butter despite lack of moisture, spinach and broccoli, carrot juice, hot peppers, pepper (salmonella can be in pepper for years), raw cookie dough, raw pistachios, and dog food.

What are the major contributing factors of recent recalls? Mostly, it's non-compliance with current Good Manufacturing Practices, failure to maintain food manufacturing facilities and equipment, non-compliant with a company's own Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and weaknesses in HACCP analysis.

Another factor is management responsibility for food safety for their products, for operations, for supply chain, etc. We're dealing with a global food ingredient procurement complexity these days, Prince said. It is much more difficult to manage.

He told the story of the infant formula recall that ended up leading to stores in cities of China not containing any infant formula, all due to melamine by some greedy businessmen who tainted their products.

When we see recalls of imported items, it is typically due to particular ingredients including milk powder. Food import problems include filth, production under unsanitary conditions, pesticide residues or use of approved pesticides, chemical contamination, or economic adulteration.

"There's a rough guess that 8 percent of food on the market is economically adulterated," he said.

Still, the biggest problem is simply salmonella. He showed us a slide of the variety of import alerts that are related to salmonella.

Recalls are also becoming more massive and expensive over time. The big peanut butter recall was a loss of over a year's worth of peanut butter. Ere is also a large legal impact coming from complaints. For example, the recall of 30,000,000 toys led to a hugely expensive settlement ($50 million).

"For those of you in the room in quality assurance, how would you like a new boss?" Prince asked. In these cases, when the government comes in, the government becomes your boss.

When you consider the economics of food safety, consider the loss of business, cost of loss of brand value, litigation, etc.

So, why the increase in all these cases?

- we concentrated our food production
- increased batch size
- product changes
- changes in food distribution
- consumer has changed
- science has changed (we're looking on ppb, versus ppt and ppm)
- epidemiology (the CDC plots info from food net surveillence trends in different parts of the country about salmonella, listeria, etc)

Salmonella is a serious problem. "When you look at what we've gone through as far as recalls, we're being bombarded from salmonella from everywhere around the world," Prince said.

The salmonella, campylobacter, and listeria outbreaks causes several fatalities when they occur.

The CDC uses the Pulse Net Database to track patterns, as in states, and has put together an outbreak team. In 2004, there was an outbreak in Tennessee that had outbreaks that the CDC tracked. They did a food history and through new technology was able to pin down peanut butter as the culprit of salmonella.

Then, peanut paste came along, which was more extensive because it was all over the country. "If it wasn't for Pulse Net they could've missed it," Prince said.

Traceability

What about traceability? Methods of traceability need to be improved. What Prince found is that most of the time traceability records were handwritten, which don't lend well to transferring electronically. Even a small accounting program or Excel spreadsheet would improve traceability.

Basically, traceability should include:

- Firm identification
- Product identification
- product coding, time code, etc.

Electronic traceability can have readable bar codes, tracking lot codes, shipping codes, etc.
"A good traceability program protects your business and provides a tool for managing supply chain," Prince said.
How do consumers see food safety? You can see that it's a big issue when you look at headlines of the melamine scandal, peanut butter recall, and so on. The data are clear: It's worth investing into food safety.

Consumers are largely concerned about germs, bacteria, pesticide residues (although not so much in this country), and terrorism. According to a Gallup poll, 29% felt recalls were serious concefn, 55 pecent would switch brands temporarily, 21% said would not purchase from company again. "Tell that to your sales department," Prince said. The changes in food purchasing is clear by sales shown in peanut butter and spinach well after a recall.

Don't forget social media, Prince warned. Monitor it well, because consumers are incredibly vocal, more than ever through these avenues.

Take Aways?

-Comply with GMPs
-Know your products
-Know your supply chain
-Know your process
-Audit your QC records (it's very educational)
-Maintain facility and equipment in sanitary manner
-Develop a food safety culture in your operation

FDA Food Safety Modernization Act


Prince then discussed the proposed FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which is having troubles in the House currently. What will happen to it, is not known. Funding is an issue, along with other problems. These are the highlights:

-registration of facilities
-performance standards
-hazard analysis
-record access
-product traceability
-lab accreditation
-mandatory recall authority
-accreditation of 3rd party auditors (related to imports)

"If the bill is not passed before Christmas, the bill is dead and will need to be reintroduced in the new congress," he said.
Prince said that complacency is often a problem with food companies when it comes to food safety. "Are you taking things for granted," he said.
He gave these examples of companies, the first that went out of business, who offered up excuses.

- "We have been in business for 67 years and we have never had a problem."
- "We've always done it like that and it has never been a problem."
- "The inspector didn't say anything about that being a problem."

In summary, Prince said that companies must look to food safety as a majof focus of their business, to develop a culture of food safety, and to never become complacent.

"Food safety is a journey," he said.

Q&A

Amusingly, someone asked Prince what foods he avoids for sure. He said sprouts and raw oysters. He added, "The safest food is a hamburger."

How our senses help us decide what we eat

Senses help us select our food.

So, this is a blog post about the importance of sensory criteria for selecting food, which was inspired by a day of cooking up goods for the holidays.

What makes people choose the foods that they do? This question may seem obvious to yourself--after all, you know what you like--but this is a question posed by food industry scientists ask themselves day in and day out.

The science of food selection can get crazy complex when you think of the huge variety of foods that you find at your corner grocery store. Food scientists must continually find new "niches" for products to be placed in the marketplace.

How do they do it? The same question can be asked of musicians who endlessly produce new songs that the radio blares as latest hits, but using the same 12 musical notes. Only, in the case of food, scientists only have five notes, or tastes, the "Five-Taste Stimuli":

-sweet
-sour
-bitter
-salty
-savory (umami - think MSG, mushrooms, tomatoes, broth)

Taste rates high in the evaluation for selection from consumers. As it happens, the sensation is produced when the food comes into contact with cilia (tiny hairs) on gustatory cells, which make up around 10,000 taste buds (depending on age; people lose them as they age).

By itself, taste isn't all that complex, but then food is mixed with other sensory criteria:

-sight
-smell
-touch (texture, mouthfeel)
-hearing (yes, the sound of food)

Sight has to do with the presentation or appearance of the food. When we first look at food, we are in a sense already "eating it" with our eyes: judging for shape and color, ripeness or rottenness, smoothness or crunchiness, well-cooked or burnt.

Visual signals, mixed up with several other stimuli, instantly tell your brain whether or not you're ready to eat that grilled chicken breast or let it brown a little longer, or whether to eat that banana or wait until it turns from green to yellow (but not to black).

Smell is a wholly vital part of what it is to create food -- and I would argue that any good food scientist is also an expert at using volatile molecules from food to reach our olfactory epithelium. Flavor, in fact, is around 75 percent smell.

In the olfactory epithelium, which is inside the nasal cavity, is where volatile molecules will act on between 10 to 20 million olfactory cells. These cells can pick up between 2,000 to 4,000 different odors. A few experts are so well trained, they can distinguish closer to 10,000 -- an extremely keen sense of smell.

Touch is a sense that we use for picking our foods because it allows us to pick up on texture, astringency, consistency and temperature. Generally, with food, we start our touch evaluations with our fingers and then as the food moves toward our lips, next is the mouthfeel.

Mouthfeel of a food can tell us a lot more: a smooth texture may mean more fat content, which is more desirable to our energy-seeking brains. It also tells us whether that steak is tender or chewy, dry or moist, if the soda pop is bubbly or flat, if the vegetables are crispy or rubbery, if citrus fruits or vinegar is astringent.

Of course, touch inside the mouth also determines a food's temperature and spiciness. Heat and cold are picked up by the taste buds. The sensation of spiciness, like the one caused by capsaicin in hot peppers, is caused by irritating nerves.

A sense of hearing might not seem as important in food selection, but most of us evaluate food all the time with sound without even realizing it. We like to hear the snap of a celery stick, the crackle of potato chips, the pop of popcorn.

The sounds give clues about whether a food is fresh or sufficiently cooked. Think also of the sound a watermelon makes when you tap it to make sure it's fresh, or the sound stir-fry makes when it's sizzling.

So, back to how food scientists use all these sensory criteria: With the five-taste stimuli and other sensory signals (as in music with 12 notes, beats and rhythms), food scientists can continue creating thousands of foods that flood our grocery stores annually.

Each and every satisfying food can be appreciated for its particular complexity of visual presentation, flavor aroma, texture and sound -- they are what makes us love to eat.

Source:

Brown, A. 2000. Understanding Food: Principles and Preparation. Wadsworth: Belmont, CA.

Who's afraid of a little something sweet?

There are few food ingredients that conjure up more fear in the public mind than sugar and sugar substitutes found in manufactured products. This fear can be bolstered by a common ploy some companies and organizations use to create panic and push their products by smearing nutritive and non-nutritive sweeteners used by their competitors.

The hysteria surrounding fructose is one such example — a simple fruit sugar found in almost every natural food on the planet has been unfairly targeted as the scapegoat for all of the extra pounds on America’s waistlines.

But although it’s appropriate for people to watch for extra calories from all sources, including sugars, reasonable amounts of fructose each day as part of a balanced diet is not really anything to worry about.

What’s alarming is the attacks on fructose have become so frequent that people have started to believe that the sugar is inherently harmful to health. The hype has even led people to believe they must reduce their intake of fruit and vegetables — now that’s frightening!

It's time to put a stop to the demonizing and scare tactics.

But wait a sec… isn't it true that high-fructose corn syrup (containing 55 percent fructose, 45 percent glucose) is a cheap sugar source widely available in sodas and processed foods, and is uniquely responsible for causing the obesity epidemic?

No, not at all. The initial study that posed this hypothesis has been largely discredited. According to the nutrition science experts, there is no evidence that overconsumption of a single nutrient, such as fructose from high-fructose corn syrup, has led people to gain more weight than other foods (1,2).

The fact is Americans live in a toxic, stressful environment, overeat everything and simply do not exercise enough.

Additionally, in 2009, a supplement in the Journal of Nutrition in 2009 called for a stop to the demonization of fructose and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) (1). They wrote, "Evidence is presented that HFCS does not pose a unique dietary risk in healthy individuals or diabetics."

In fact, in the same paper, the author seeks to dispel other myths about fructose by pointing out the following facts:

- Fructose coexists with glucose in all common nutritive sweeteners including honey, fruits and vegetables, agave nectar, and regular table sugar (50 percent fructose, 50 percent glucose)
- The human body is well adapted to handling sugars in normal ranges
- Replacing all the fructose in manufactured foods with other nutritive sweeteners would not improve health or solve the obesity crisis

There is also a list of good reasons for why people should continue to have fructose in their diets.
- Fructose is sweeter than glucose, so a balance of both helps food manufacturers use less sugar overall in foods.
- Since fructose is absorbed differently than glucose, it blunts a glycemic response, leading to lower insulin levels.
- Fructose makes things with naturally unpleasant flavors (like vitamins and minerals) taste better.
Unlike non-caloric, artificial sweeteners, fructose helps to fuel the body with energy.

Eating fructose in normal ranges daily, as part of a nutritionally balanced diet, shouldn't haunt you or your waistline. As long as you’re not getting too much fructose, or any other added sugar, or using added sugars to replace nutrient-dense foods (2, 3), then there’s nothing to fear.

So, what of the scare tactics and supposed experts saying we need to limit fructose to only a few grams daily to avoid overproduction of fats in the blood and obesity? These claims are totally, utterly, unfounded.

The truth is that fructose is metabolized in the liver and is first used to replenish liver glycogen stores, which are in turn used to fuel the body during fasting. The average human liver has the capacity to store around 85 to 100 grams or more of liver glycogen.

When fructose is consumed in a normal range as our hunter-gatherer ancestors did when they ate fruits and vegetables all year round – and as part of a reduced-calorie diet for building muscle and losing weight – it and its cousin sweeteners such as sucrose, glucose, honey, agave nectar, fruit juice concentrates, and sugar alcohols really aren’t so freaky after all.

Sources:

1. White JS. Supplement: The State of the Science on Dietary Sweeteners Containing Fructose. J Nutr, 139(6), 1219S-1227S, June 2009, doi:10.3945/jn.108.097998.
2. Fulgoni V. Supplement: High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS): Everything You Wanted to Know, but Were Afraid to Ask. Am J of Clin Nutr, 88(6), 1715S, December 2008, doi:10.3945/ajcn.2008.25825A.
3. Thompson FE, McNeel TS, Dowling EC, Midthune D, Morrissette M, Zeruto CA. Interrelationships of added sugars intake, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity in adults in the United States: National Health Interview Survey, 2005. J Am Diet Assoc 2009;109:1376
4. Drewnowski A, Specter SE. Poverty and obesity: the role of energy density and energy costs. Am J of Clin Nutr, 79(1), 6-16, January 2004.

Ampipathic lecithin

Lecithin's talent comes from its amphipathic nature.(1) The compound's hydrophilic polar head dissolves in water while its hydrophobic polar tail dissolves in the triglycerides, thus, acting in a way of suspending triglycerides in water.(1p568)

As an emulsifier in ice cream, lecithin keeps ice cream smooth with fat globules evenly distributed throughout the solution.(2) It serves to bring fat and ice crystals together, which normally don't mix. Before commercial lecithin was available, egg yolks were used.(2)

Another useful application:

Want to know how to make your own salt air foam to a homemade margarita? The secret is soy lecithin. You can buy it at any health food store and mix about a teaspoon with water, salt and lime juice.

Reference

1. Denniston, KJ, Topping, JJ & Caret, RL. General, Organic, And Biochemistry, 5th ed. New York: McGraw Hill; 2007, p568.

2. Halford, B. Ice cream: The finer points of physical chemistry and flavor release make this favorite treat so sweet. Science & Technology. 2004;82(45):51. Available at: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/stuff/8245icecream.html. Accessed on November 1, 2008.