Like fine wines, sea salts are artisanal products that inspire talk of terroir, texture and provenance. Now there’s evidence that they can also be sources of spoilage moulds.
New research from Cornell mycologist Kathie Hodge and doctoral candidate Megan Biango-Daniels reveals varying levels of mould contamination in commercial sea salts. Among those moulds were important food spoilage moulds like Aspergillus and Penicillium, and even some notorious producers of mycotoxins.
“This new finding contradicts the conventional wisdom that salts are sterile ingredients,” said Biango-Daniels. The research stressed the importance of understanding the risk of using sea salt during food production.
Starting with seven different commercial salts, the researchers extracted living fungi and grew them in the lab for identification. The fungi discovered in the salt have potential to spoil food when used as an ingredient and can introduce mycotoxins or allergens when consumed.
At the levels discovered in the study, about 1.7 spores per gram, you’re not risking your health by sprinkling sea salt on food you are about to eat. But big problems may result when sea salts are used at home or industrially to make cured meats, fermented pickles or brined cheeses that mature over time, when moulds introduced with sea salt can begin to grow and spoil food, maybe even rendering it toxic.
“Fungi can survive in surprisingly hostile places. They can’t increase or grow in a container of sea salt – nothing can – but spores of some fungi survive quite happily there. Later they can wake up and make trouble in our food,” said Hodge, associate professor in the Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Cornell Universityhttp://tinyurl.com/ydc7abxq

Borrowing concepts from medical diagnostic devices, Colorado State University chemists have created a simple, cheap set of handheld tests that can detect the presence of many water or food-borne pathogens. If applied in the field, such tests could greatly reduce the number of expensive follow-up tests needed to keep the food supply safe from fecal contamination.
The new testing systems are innovations from the lab of Chuck Henry, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry.
For their study, Henry and colleagues targeted a broad class of bacteria known as fecal indicator bacteria (FIB), which cause the highest number of hospitalizations and deaths from food poisoning. A common culprit: the use of unsafe water to irrigate green vegetables like alfalfa sprouts, spinach and lettuce.
While federal regulations require regular testing of fruits and vegetables for contamination with fecal matter, standard processes could use improvement. Common techniques like immunoassays and polymerase chain reactions (PCR) work reasonably well, but they can lead to false positives and require expensive equipment. The gold standard for bacterial detection is a lab culture, but this can take up to 48 hours to complete.
Henry and colleagues went for accurate, simple and cheap. They made two types of tests that detect an enzyme associated with the FIB bacteria. The first is a small strip of paper treated with a substrate molecule that changes colour when it contacts the bacterial enzyme – similar to a home pregnancy test. The researchers envision a smart phone app could be coupled with the paper test.
“We found that with filter paper, wax and a little bit of packing tape, we can do quite a bit of chemistry on here,” Henry said. “That’s about 2 cents worth of materials.”
Their second test is electrochemical and consists of screen-printed carbon electrodes on transparent sheets, which indicate the same bacteria by being inserted into a reader. The setup is similar to a home glucometer.
The researchers ran tests of contaminated water from a nearby lagoon, as well as water contaminated with E. coli and Enterococcus faecalis that was used to wash clean alfalfa sprouts. Both tests detected the harmful bacteria within four to 12 hours.
They next want to build a mobile computing platform for their tests. They’re working on a Raspberry Pi-based system that could perform kinetic measurements to detect changes in the bacteria levels over time, and automatically transmit the information to a cloud platform. The team is working with computer science researcher Sangmi Pallickara on these advances.
Henry explained that his lab’s new tests can’t tell exactly which bacteria are present, but they can detect the broad class of FIB bacteria that are usually responsible for foodborne illness outbreaks or closed beaches during the summer. “At this point, it is accurate but not specific,” Henry said. “This is the test that tells you that you need to do more tests.”

Colorado State Universityhttp://tinyurl.com/yag7chc5

Preserving the natural structure of plant-based food during processing can limit the amount of fat and energy absorbed by the body, a new study reports.
During this innovative multi-centred study researchers from the Quadram Institute, King’s College London, the University of Surrey and the University of Messina showed that preserving the natural structure of plant-based foods can limit how quickly fats are exposed to digestive enzymes in the stomach helping to regulate the amount of fat absorbed by the body.
Focusing on almonds, which contain 50% fat, researchers investigated the effects different processing methods had on how almonds are ingested by the body.
Despite being a high fat food, it has been shown previously that eating whole almonds doesn’t result in weight gain. Investigating why this might be, the researchers provided a study participant with two almond muffins, one made with almond chunks (2 mm) and one made with almond flour, which has much smaller particles (at less than half a millimetre).
The muffins were chewed as normal but instead of swallowing were put into an instrument known as the Dynamic Gastric Model, which accurately mimics the physical and chemical conditions of the human stomach and small bowel, enabling the researchers to calculate how much fat had been released.
After 60 minutes in the model stomach, which is the time calculated for this meal to pass through in humans, over 40% of the total fat content had been released from the muffins made with almond flour, but just under 6% had been released from the muffins made with larger almond chunks. Samples taken from the simulated small bowel showed that after 9 hours of digestion, almost all (97%) of the fat from the muffin made with flour was released, and only 60% of fat in the muffin made with almond chunks was released.
The researchers concluded that maintaining the structural integrity of the tough cell walls, which form dietary fibre, surrounding the fat-rich cells in almonds was the main factor in determining the digestibility of fats.
Dr Cathrina Edwards from the Quadram Institute said: “What we have found is that if the natural plant structure is maintained the level of fat the body absorbs is greatly reduced, helping in weight management and potentially helping to reduce incidences of cardiovascular disease.”

Health Canalhttp://tinyurl.com/ycwogram

In recent years, the Western European market for non-alcoholic beverages (NARTD) has hardly grown in volume, while the number of brands, flavours, and product extensions has grown dramatically. The RaboResearch report ‘With a Little Help from My (Bottling) Friends: Changing Production Footprints as SKU Numbers Rise” explains how this fundamental change will require companies to adjust their business models.
NARTD consumption in Western Europe has been static in recent years. At the same time, brands have shifted from producing a small range of large stock-keeping units (SKUs) to a large number of smaller SKUs. This complexity is set to increase further, even though growth in SKUs will not be infinite and will slow down in the future.
Many brand owners have not yet fully adjusted their operations footprint to the new landscape. As changeovers on production lines cost a lot of time, brand owners should reconsider their production model. The logical result will probably be additional consolidation among established bottling networks, along with a growing role for larger, full-service contract manufacturers.
“The recently observed consolidation in the Coca-Cola bottling landscape and the acquisitions made by Refresco in North America are indications of things to come,” according to Francois Sonneville, Senior Analyst – Beverages. “Although we expect some small, efficient toll manufacturers to survive in the near term, we believe they will eventually need to decide if they want to be consolidators or be acquired.”

Rabobankhttp://tinyurl.com/yczq9jed

The song says a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but an Iowa State University scientist has published new research suggesting a spoonful of oil makes vegetables more nutritious.  
A new study led by Wendy White, an associate professor of food science and human nutrition, shows that eating salad with added fat in the form of soybean oil promotes the absorption of eight different micronutrients that promote human health. Conversely, eating the same salad without the added oil lessens the likelihood that the body will absorb the nutrients.  The results may ease the guilt of countless dieters who fret about adding dressing to their salads.
White’s study found added oil aided in the absorption of seven different micronutrients in salad vegetables. Those nutrients include four carotenoids – alpha and beta carotene, lutein and lycopene – two forms of vitamin E and vitamin K. The oil also promoted the absorption of vitamin A, the eighth micronutrient tracked in the study, which formed in the intestine from the alpha and beta carotene. The new study builds on previous research from White’s group that focused on alpha and beta carotene and lycopene.
White said better absorption of the nutrients promotes a range of health benefits, including cancer prevention and eyesight preservation.
The study also found that the amount of oil added to the vegetables had a proportional relationship with the amount of nutrient absorption. That is, more oil means more absorption.
“The best way to explain it would be to say that adding twice the amount of salad dressing leads to twice the nutrient absorption,” White said.
That doesn’t give salad eaters license to drench their greens in dressing, she cautioned. But she said consumers should be perfectly comfortable with the U.S. dietary recommendation of about two tablespoons of oil per day.

Iowa State Universityhttp://tinyurl.com/y73ftsl8