4beans4me
Thu, Aug-11-05, 23:06
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And a dash of fish tissue
By Melanie Warner The New York Times
FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/11/business/pudgy.php
NEW YORK (http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=NEW YORK&sort=swishrank) Low-fat fried chicken may seem like a contradiction in terms, but not to Stephen Kelleher.
On a recent morning, he hovered over a whirling assembly line as a waterfall of gray liquid cascaded over slabs of breaded chicken. Then the magic began.
During the bath in the liquid solution, which consists of water and protein molecules extracted from a slurry of chicken or fish tissue, a thin, imperceptible shield formed around the meat.
When the chicken is submerged in oil, the coating blocks fat from being absorbed from the fryer.
Voila! The chicken contains 50 percent less fat than a typical piece of fried chicken.
Just another day in the strange world of food scientists.
Kelleher, the founder of Proteus Industries in Gloucester, Massachusetts, is one of many chemists who work, often in secret, in a little-understood part of the $550 billion processed-food industry. These are the people who ultimately put food together, and their mission is critical: developing foods that let consumers have their cake and eat it, too.
With two-thirds of Americans considered overweight to some degree and yet many professing a desire to eat in a more healthful way, every major food producer and food-ingredient company has ordered its scientists to find the holy grail: products that either have less bad stuff - fat, white flour, sugar and salt - or more good stuff like whole grains, fiber and fish oil.
Some of these food additives are natural and some are not. But even those that are natural do not evoke images of a country harvest. Fat-repellent coatings, after all, do not grow on trees.
Coming soon to grocery stores, for example, could be salty corn chips cooked in oil but marketed as healthful because the addition of chemically modified starches makes them high in fiber.
Labeled simply as "modified cornstarch," this cannot be broken down until it reaches the colon, much like the natural fiber found in fruit and vegetables. Also coming soon: bread containing microscopic capsules of fish oil, enabling food companies to contend that the bread is "heart-healthy" because of the cholesterol and triglyceride-lowering omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil.
Some nutritionists question whether all this alchemy will further confuse consumers about the basics of good nutrition. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, maintains that the best way to get fish oil into your diet will always be to eat fish.
"What this does is to turn food into medicine," Nestle said.
"Omega-3s occur naturally in food like fish, chicken and eggs, and plants to a lesser extent. Why do we need to get it from bread?"
One reason may be that products that can be marketed as healthier often generate higher sales and fatter profits for food companies.
PepsiCo, for instance, reports that sales of its healthier "Smart Spot" items - products like Baked Lay's potato crisps, Tropicana orange juice, Diet Pepsi and Quaker oatmeal - are growing at double the pace of other products.
Foods labeled as healthy also present a show of good faith to administration officials, members of Congress, consumer groups and trial lawyers, who all monitor the food industry's response to the U.S. obesity problem.
Ingredient companies today sell $4 billion worth of additives to the food industry a year and are responsible for many of the common properties of processed food.
Additives, for instance, keep the fruit in yogurt suspended, not plopped at the bottom.
They make sure that chicken dinners do not come out of the microwave hot around the edges and cold in the middle, and they allow many foods to stay in warehouses or on supermarket shelves for up to nine months without spoiling.
Tate & Lyle of London, one of the largest food-ingredient companies in the world, makes the popular sweetener Splenda.
It recently started selling a whole-grain "cracker system" composed of Splenda and hydrolyzed wheat protein, an additive that has been manipulated - either chemically or through enzymes - to give the softness of white flour without adding carbohydrates.
Other ingredient companies are focusing on what they can add to food to make it healthier.
Both Cargill, the commodities operation that has a large food-ingredient business, and National Starch Food Innovation, the food arm of National Starch and Chemical based in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and itself a unit of Imperial Chemical Industries of Britain, have seized upon the fact that the average American consumes less than half the fiber each day that the government recommends.
Nutritionists consider fiber beneficial because it prompts slower, steady digestion, preventing spikes in blood sugar and insulin. It has also been shown to prevent colon cancer.
The most obvious way to get more fiber into the diet is to increase consumption of whole and unprocessed fruit, vegetables and legumes.
But food companies say that many Americans are unwilling to make significant changes in their eating choices to do this, and food companies are more than willing to fill in the gaps.
Rather than simply add a fiber like bran to foods, which can produce a coarse consistency that some dislike, Cargill and National Starch are selling something called resistant starch.
They start with starch that has been extracted from either tapioca or corn and then modify it through a patented process - Cargill uses chemicals and National Starch uses enzymes - so that it will resist digestion in a way that mimics naturally occurring fiber.
Judy Marlett, a fiber expert and former nutrition professor at the University of Wisconsin, explains that when starch is modified to be resistant, the molecular structure changes.
The bonds between glucose molecules are covered up so that digestive enzymes cannot get to them.
As a result, resistant starch, like natural fiber, is not digested until it reaches the lower intestine, where bacteria are finally able to break it down.
Dorothy Peterson, a starch specialist for Cargill, says that the company is marketing resistant starch as an additive for products including bread, muffins, pasta and corn chips, allowing companies to increase the fiber content by several grams a serving.
"It's a simple way to do fiber addition," Peterson said.
"We've gotten a tremendous amount of interest from customers," Peterson added.
And a dash of fish tissue
By Melanie Warner The New York Times
FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/11/business/pudgy.php
NEW YORK (http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=NEW YORK&sort=swishrank) Low-fat fried chicken may seem like a contradiction in terms, but not to Stephen Kelleher.
On a recent morning, he hovered over a whirling assembly line as a waterfall of gray liquid cascaded over slabs of breaded chicken. Then the magic began.
During the bath in the liquid solution, which consists of water and protein molecules extracted from a slurry of chicken or fish tissue, a thin, imperceptible shield formed around the meat.
When the chicken is submerged in oil, the coating blocks fat from being absorbed from the fryer.
Voila! The chicken contains 50 percent less fat than a typical piece of fried chicken.
Just another day in the strange world of food scientists.
Kelleher, the founder of Proteus Industries in Gloucester, Massachusetts, is one of many chemists who work, often in secret, in a little-understood part of the $550 billion processed-food industry. These are the people who ultimately put food together, and their mission is critical: developing foods that let consumers have their cake and eat it, too.
With two-thirds of Americans considered overweight to some degree and yet many professing a desire to eat in a more healthful way, every major food producer and food-ingredient company has ordered its scientists to find the holy grail: products that either have less bad stuff - fat, white flour, sugar and salt - or more good stuff like whole grains, fiber and fish oil.
Some of these food additives are natural and some are not. But even those that are natural do not evoke images of a country harvest. Fat-repellent coatings, after all, do not grow on trees.
Coming soon to grocery stores, for example, could be salty corn chips cooked in oil but marketed as healthful because the addition of chemically modified starches makes them high in fiber.
Labeled simply as "modified cornstarch," this cannot be broken down until it reaches the colon, much like the natural fiber found in fruit and vegetables. Also coming soon: bread containing microscopic capsules of fish oil, enabling food companies to contend that the bread is "heart-healthy" because of the cholesterol and triglyceride-lowering omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil.
Some nutritionists question whether all this alchemy will further confuse consumers about the basics of good nutrition. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, maintains that the best way to get fish oil into your diet will always be to eat fish.
"What this does is to turn food into medicine," Nestle said.
"Omega-3s occur naturally in food like fish, chicken and eggs, and plants to a lesser extent. Why do we need to get it from bread?"
One reason may be that products that can be marketed as healthier often generate higher sales and fatter profits for food companies.
PepsiCo, for instance, reports that sales of its healthier "Smart Spot" items - products like Baked Lay's potato crisps, Tropicana orange juice, Diet Pepsi and Quaker oatmeal - are growing at double the pace of other products.
Foods labeled as healthy also present a show of good faith to administration officials, members of Congress, consumer groups and trial lawyers, who all monitor the food industry's response to the U.S. obesity problem.
Ingredient companies today sell $4 billion worth of additives to the food industry a year and are responsible for many of the common properties of processed food.
Additives, for instance, keep the fruit in yogurt suspended, not plopped at the bottom.
They make sure that chicken dinners do not come out of the microwave hot around the edges and cold in the middle, and they allow many foods to stay in warehouses or on supermarket shelves for up to nine months without spoiling.
Tate & Lyle of London, one of the largest food-ingredient companies in the world, makes the popular sweetener Splenda.
It recently started selling a whole-grain "cracker system" composed of Splenda and hydrolyzed wheat protein, an additive that has been manipulated - either chemically or through enzymes - to give the softness of white flour without adding carbohydrates.
Other ingredient companies are focusing on what they can add to food to make it healthier.
Both Cargill, the commodities operation that has a large food-ingredient business, and National Starch Food Innovation, the food arm of National Starch and Chemical based in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and itself a unit of Imperial Chemical Industries of Britain, have seized upon the fact that the average American consumes less than half the fiber each day that the government recommends.
Nutritionists consider fiber beneficial because it prompts slower, steady digestion, preventing spikes in blood sugar and insulin. It has also been shown to prevent colon cancer.
The most obvious way to get more fiber into the diet is to increase consumption of whole and unprocessed fruit, vegetables and legumes.
But food companies say that many Americans are unwilling to make significant changes in their eating choices to do this, and food companies are more than willing to fill in the gaps.
Rather than simply add a fiber like bran to foods, which can produce a coarse consistency that some dislike, Cargill and National Starch are selling something called resistant starch.
They start with starch that has been extracted from either tapioca or corn and then modify it through a patented process - Cargill uses chemicals and National Starch uses enzymes - so that it will resist digestion in a way that mimics naturally occurring fiber.
Judy Marlett, a fiber expert and former nutrition professor at the University of Wisconsin, explains that when starch is modified to be resistant, the molecular structure changes.
The bonds between glucose molecules are covered up so that digestive enzymes cannot get to them.
As a result, resistant starch, like natural fiber, is not digested until it reaches the lower intestine, where bacteria are finally able to break it down.
Dorothy Peterson, a starch specialist for Cargill, says that the company is marketing resistant starch as an additive for products including bread, muffins, pasta and corn chips, allowing companies to increase the fiber content by several grams a serving.
"It's a simple way to do fiber addition," Peterson said.
"We've gotten a tremendous amount of interest from customers," Peterson added.