Consumer Health and Food Safety
The modern consumer demands food that is fresher, more nutritious, healthier and safer. Changing lifestyles, however, mean that people are also eating more convenience and restaurant meals. These trends have major implications for the food industry and pose challenges with respect to food safety, food processing and food quality. Biotechnology offers us a range of techniques to meet these needs and tackle these problems, as well as providing new opportunities for the Irish food industry. Food traceability and authenticity tests, diagnostic tests to detect and prevent food poisoning, and novel functional foods are just some of the potential applications for food biotechnology.
Food safety
Food safety is the absolute priority. It must be assured to protect the consumer, and to maintain and expand food markets. Priority research themes are:
- To develop rapid and sensitive diagnostic kits to detect pathogens in food (DNA-based approaches offer the best potential)
- Genetic analysis of food-borne pathogens (eg E coli 0157 and Salmonella) to understand how they survive and grow in food, especially at chill temperatures and during processing and cooking
- Study pathogen-host interactions to identify new ways to treat, and ideally prevent, food-borne illnesses
- Develop proactive approaches to food safety using protection cultures (probiotics) and bacteriocins
- Develop improved processing technologies that minimise the need for chemical preservatives (see also Chapter 3)
- Study the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in food bacteria, and how this is acquired
In addition, genetic technologies mean we can now trace problem organisms to their source. Combined with HACCP (hazard analysis of critical control points), these procedures should significantly improve food safety.
Food for health
Diet and health are intimately connected. Increasingly we know that certain foods and food components can help prevent some diseases, while others can trigger their onset and development. Thus saturated fats are associated with cardiovascular disease, while green vegetables contain useful anti-oxidants which can reduce the risk of cancer. More research is needed if we are to improve the nutritional and health status of our food. Priority research strands are:
- Investigate the beneficial constituents of Irish foods and establish their health consequences. Components of interest here include: conjugated linoleic acid (a heath-promoting fatty acid found in milk and meat and which is thought to help fight cancer, obesity and diabetes); anti-oxidants (which also help prevent cancer); flavonoids, etc.
- Food enrichment with health-promoting ingredients such as vitamins (eg folic acid) and bio-active peptides
- Investigate the undesirable food constituents and their negative effect on human health (such as trans-fatty acids and coronary heart disease)
Functional foods and probiotics
Functional foods, which incorporate either health-promoting active ingredients and/or pro-biotic bacterial cultures, are a new and important food market. These are value-added niche products and marketing studies predict that they will be a key growth area in the next 10 years, possibly even surpassing the low-calorie food market. Functional foods already on sale here include cheeses and yogurts containing probiotic cultures said to improve digestion and the immune function; and spreads and cheeses containing plant stanols and said to reduce cholesterol levels. Other products have been designed to alleviate conditions that include food intolerance, nutritional disorders and osteoporosis. Further research is needed however, to:
- Elucidate how probiotic bacteria actually improve human health (such information would also be essential to support any health claims made for a probiotic product)
- Improve the ability of probiotic strains to withstand food processing
- Increase the range of functional and probiotic products available
