Making processed food healthy

Salt, sugar and fat: this trifecta is blamed for a number of health issues, including obesity, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately, these three ingredients are what make food taste good. Salt is a taste enhancer, fat gives a good mouthfeel and enhances flavours and sugar gives an immediate sensation of pleasure.

Reducing the salt, sugar and fat content of foods has long been the focus of research, but all this work counts for nothing if consumers tend to opt for the original, rather than the low-salt/sugar/fat option. In order to reduce the public health burden by designing healthier processed food, scientists need to make sure consumers will actually want to eat it.

With this in mind, the European Union has funded two research projects: TeRiFiQ and PLEASURE. TeRiFiQ’s aim is binary (salt and fat, or fat and sugar) reduction of sodium, fat or sugar in cheese, bakery products, meat products and ready meals.

“The challenge is to find solutions which combine reduction objectives as defined by WHO, technological feasibility at an industrial scale and preservation of sensory and nutritional properties of the products,” said Christian Salles of the Center for Taste and Feeding Behaviour at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), and TeRiFiQ coordinator.

However, creating the products is only half the battle, according to Jean-Michel Lecerf, head of the Nutrition department at the Pasteur Institute in Lille.

“The objectives of TeRiFiQ are relevant, but it can only be effective if consumers change their habits in terms of alimentary choices and intake. Such programs must be carried out alongside prevention policies of nutrition-related diseases.”

Scientists involved in the TeRiFiQ program are exploring different ways to achieve these objectives. Reducing salt in cheese, for example, can be difficult as some microorganisms can thrive if the concentration is too low.

One possibility is to cheat the senses. In potato chips, for instance, one solution is to spray a very thin powder of salt as uniformly as possible on the surface. The taste and mouthfeel is the same, but the amount of salt is lower.

For fat, a technique called cryocristallisation, which involved spraying frozen fat on the food, gives an even distribution but uses a lower quantity. “So far, it hasn’t worked,” Salles said. “After a while, the fat comes out of the product.” In addition, the technology is very expensive.

“Replacement can lead to undesirable flavours, requesting the use of masking chemical agents to hide them,” said José Manuel Barat Baviera, head of the Food technology department at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

“As salt interacts with aromas, replacement modifies the sensory perception of the product. So, it is very difficult to keep the original taste of the product unchanged.”

From 2015, the small food manufacturers who are partners in the project will start testing these new approaches with the aim of eventually implementing some of them in their products.

Source.