New Ohio State center aims to unearth secrets to make foods healthier
COLUMBUS, Ohio — What if commercially made whole-wheat bread tasted just as good as its refined-wheat counterpart? What if you could enjoy the guilty pleasure of eating a bag of potato chips with a third less sodium but all the flavor?
These are the types of questions being tackled by the Flavor Research and Education Center, newly arrived to The Ohio State University.
“Dietary guidelines provide a basis to promote a healthy lifestyle, but they are not well followed. People tend to select foods they enjoy, they can afford, and that are convenient,” said Devin Peterson, director of the center and professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. Both the center and department are part of the university’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.
The center focuses on research geared to find commercially viable ways of making mass-produced foods healthier and still meet the high standards of consumer acceptability.
For example, some of its work centers on the acceptability of mass-marketed whole-grain foods.
“We know that eating whole grains is healthy, but only 10 to 12 percent of the population eats the recommended amount,” Peterson said. “Someone could go to an artisan bakery and buy a loaf of whole-grain bread that’s likely to be more acceptable, but the general population doesn’t do that, and whole-grain foods are less liked overall.
“We want to provide food solutions that have a population-wide impact. Flavor is a primary driver of food choice. So to increase the consumption of healthier foods, we need to make those foods taste good.”
As a partnership between industry and academia, the center’s 16 member companies pay an annual membership fee. The funds support graduate students to conduct research that benefits the entire industry.
“The industry has been chasing these holy grails — to reduce salt, reduce sugar and reduce fat — for a long time now, and new challenges include developing more ‘whole foods’ with simple labels and from sustainable ingredients,” Peterson said. “But there’s just not that much public funding available to help us understand the underlying aspects of food quality and food chemistry.”
The center fills that gap, conducting basic research to provide fundamental knowledge to help companies broaden their understanding of ingredients to help meet the needs of the future.
One example of the center’s findings is its investigation of compounds that form when whole grains are used in processed foods, Peterson said.
“When we investigated the bitter compounds that your tongue responds to, we found they originated from the whole-wheat flour when water was added to make dough,” he said. “When water is added, enzymes in the flour generate these compounds, and they do that within about five minutes.”
With this information, companies can choose flour made from wheat that doesn’t have as many of those enzymes — and, if it’s not available, encourage the breeding of new wheat lines to meet flavor standards.
“Nature can do more of the heavy lifting for us, if we understand how,” Peterson said.
Another line of study focuses on sodium, which is ubiquitous in processed foods because people like the flavor and it’s a cheap ingredient, Peterson said. But health authorities say Americans consume too much sodium, contributing to high blood pressure and related heart problems, and they encourage a goal of reducing sodium intake by 30 to 40 percent.
In one study, the center conducted research on how much salt the tongue perceives.
“What we found is that salt is not very well extracted in your mouth during consumption,” Peterson said. “If you have a potato chip that has salt on top of it, you’re probably only perceiving 15 to 20 percent of the salt that’s there.
“If we can figure out how salt attaches to food and liberate more of it in the mouth during consumption, we can add a lot less salt to the food and it would taste just as salty. For example, if 10 percent of the salt is released now, if we find a way to increase that to 14 percent, we can reduce the salt in that food by 30 percent and you’d never notice the difference.”
Peterson established the center at the University of Minnesota in 2011 and moved it to Ohio State in August 2016. Along with Peterson came two staff members and about a dozen postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. Peterson said Ohio State offered the energy, ambition and commitment to agricultural research that provide the foundation the center requires.
For more information about the center, see frec.osu.edu.
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Devin Peterson
614-688-2723
peterson.892@osu.edu