And these will not be pills, but labels
Forewarned is forearmed. If a fat person knows about all the nasties and calories that are in foods, he will probably think about his future prospects - this is what experts from the National Research Center reasoned. Healthy eating”, which propose the introduction of expanded labeling for all industrially produced edibles presented in our stores. This simple measure, experts are sure, will put a barrier to the spread of the obesity epidemic in Russia.
If you realize the real rate of spread of the obesity epidemic in the country, it’s time to shout “Guard!” Just think - the incidence of obesity among adults has increased by almost 2.5 times in just four years! These are the data provided by Rospotrebnadzor. Therefore, it’s time to force people to think about what they eat by any means possible.
As experts from the Healthy Nutrition Research Center say, today there is not much information on product labels: you can find out data on its composition and calorie content, as well as the amount of carbohydrates, proteins and total fat. However, very often the presented data is unreadable, and the concept of “ nutritional value"does not imply disclosure of all harmful substances that are in products. For example, today Russian laws do not oblige manufacturers to bring to the attention of consumers information about the content of trans fats that are extremely harmful to the body.
One more point: it’s a rare Russian who is knowledgeable in matters of nutrition, that is, able to independently understand whether a product contains a lot or a little salt, sugar, fat? On this occasion, SRC experts even conducted a survey among consumers, which showed that our people pay attention mainly to the column labeled “shelf life.” Thank God, of course, but this is extremely little, experts complain. “Unfortunately, the food sold in our stores today is mainly a source of empty calories. And this unfavorably distinguishes our country from other countries in the world, where fast food is named the main cause of obesity. However, global experience demonstrates that mandatory labeling helps reduce the amount of calories and saturated fat consumed,” says Zinaida Medvedeva, director of the Healthy Nutrition Research Center.
The positive trend is that our fellow citizens are still interested in eating healthy. Therefore in last years farm products and products labeled “eco” are wildly popular. But, alas, often we are only fooled by such inscriptions on goods, because there is no law in the country obliging us to confirm the environmental friendliness and naturalness of goods. And anyone can call their products farm products - can you prove that this is not so?
Meanwhile, as Medvedeva notes, the incidence of obesity and other diseases associated with poor nutrition is determined mainly by the consumption of substances such as sugar, salt, saturated fats and trans fats. Therefore, it is about them that the label should contain information in the first place. “It is important to teach the buyer to pay attention to this “four”, and not to the attractive packaging of the product and exhortations that the milk has just come from the cow,” notes Zinaida Medvedeva.
By the way, even the World Health Organization is advocating for the widespread introduction of such labels. And their effectiveness has been proven in studies that have shown that health warnings on packaging reduce product consumption by up to 41%!
And yet, introducing such a measure in Russia is not easy due to the strong lobby of manufacturers who are very actively resisting the prospect of revealing all their cards. It is not surprising: sugar and salt are classified as preservatives, which help to significantly increase the shelf life of products, and trans fats also significantly reduce the cost of the production process. Therefore, experts believe, the introduction of expanded labeling should become part of the state strategy to combat obesity and be included in the Strategy Healthy image lives of Russians. Russians can only rely on themselves and choose those products on the labels of which the proportion of trans fats, saturated fats, salt and sugar is indicated voluntarily by manufacturers.
Today, 80% of production comes from Indonesia and Malaysia. The oil is obtained from the fruits of the oil palm (palm) and from their seeds (palm kernel). Africa is considered the birthplace of palm oil. According to archaeological excavations, it was used in Egypt 5,000 years ago.
The composition of palm oil differs from other vegetable oils, since half of it consists of saturated fats and half of unsaturated fats. It is this feature of the composition and the incredible productivity of oil palm that has made it the number one oil in the world.
Red palm oil is good for digestion, heart and blood vessels. Vitamins A and E, palmitic, linoleic, oleic acid and coenzyme Q10 in combination normalize blood pressure, strengthen the walls of blood vessels and reduce the risk of blood clots.
Red palm oil should be consumed raw in salads and is also used as a functional additive in various foods.
Jeremy Weate/Flickr.com/CC BY 2.0
In Russia, they are actively discussing so-called “technical” palm oil, which in fact does not exist.
During the first purification, the oil is freed from free fatty acids, which are used for technical needs - for example, the production of candles - and the remaining oil is called CPO (from the English crude palm oil - crude palm oil).
The oil is exported to many countries, where it undergoes further processing, refining and deodorization. The output is colorless and odorless oil, which serves as the fatty base of many products.
Palm oil is actively used in Food Industry USA, Europe and Asia. According to international statistics, in 2010, 70% of palm oil was used for food purposes, 24% was used in the cosmetics industry and about 4% became the basis for biodiesel fuel.
All over the world there are requirements for the degree of purity of palm oil used for food purposes. It is worth noting that in Russia this product is not used for frying or deep-frying, unlike Malaysia and Indonesia.
For us, palm oil is more of a semi-finished product - it is used to produce special-purpose fat (a milk substitute), as well as fractions for use in the confectionery, baking and fat-and-oil industries.
Replacing trans fats
Despite the myths, palm oil does not contain harmful trans fats or cholesterol.
It does not require “hardening”, unlike liquid vegetable oils, which are subjected to special treatment with hydrogen - the so-called partial hydrogenation.
This method was widely used in the global and Soviet food industry throughout the 20th century, until in the mid-1990s, scientists from Holland proved that trans fats obtained as a result of this process are fatally harmful to humans. They change lipid metabolism, which leads to cardiovascular diseases, diabetes,.
The recognition of trans fats as a harmful food component has prompted the global food industry to seek replacements for partially hydrogenated fats. Palm oil was suitable in terms of its nutritional and technical characteristics.
Zinaida Medvedeva/Research Center "Healthy Nutrition"
Solid at room temperature, butter can be used to make dough, icing, cream and sponge cakes, but it costs three times less than butter, and is not as harmful as trans fats.
The use of palm oil increased from the mid-1990s, and its production tripled over the next 20 years.
Many countries have adopted government bans on harmful trans fats, followed by active awareness campaigns and labeling programs.
Denmark introduced the first complete ban on trans fats in food in 2003, followed by Iceland, Sweden, Hungary, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, the USA and Argentina.
At the same time, palm oil consumption in the EU has doubled since 2000, reaching almost 7 million tons in 2015, which is 10 times higher than the amount of palm oil imported to Russia in the same year.
Unfortunately, Russians know almost nothing about the dangers of trans fats. This is confirmed by data from a survey on customer preferences conducted by the Healthy Nutrition Research Center.
Only 1 in 10 people have heard about trans fats, and almost no one knows where they are found and how harmful they are, but more than half of the respondents know about the dangers of palm oil from the media.
Today in Russia there is only a partial restriction of trans fats. Thus, in margarines and spreads the standards are set at 20% and 8%, respectively - from a scientific point of view, unacceptably high figures.
According to technical regulations, from 2018, manufacturers must reduce them to 2% (internationally recognized level). However, given the “bad” reputation of palm oil, which is the main replacement for trans fats, producers may lobby to maintain the same levels for another five years.
Unloading palm tree fruits in production
Palm spore
Opponents of palm oil often say that it can make food difficult to digest. This statement has no scientific basis.
Palm oil is similar to other fats (butter, beef tallow, lamb fat, chicken fat, sunflower oil) and is broken down by the enzyme lipase.
The influence of palm oil and its components on the human body is being studied by leading scientific institutes. Thus, the MedLine database of scientific publications alone contains more than two thousand studies on this topic.
Scientists are unanimous in their assessments: replacing trans fats with palm oil in food significantly improves the blood lipid profile - a biomarker of the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
The main health concerns about palm oil are related to its high saturated fat content.
Recent comparative studies of palm oil with other vegetable oils (soybean, olive, sunflower) have not revealed significant differences in their effect on biomarkers of cardiovascular disease risk: the level of total cholesterol, low- and high-density lipoproteins in human blood.
However, like any fat, palm oil contains 9 kcal for every gram. Therefore, in order to comply with WHO recommendations on consuming no more than 30% of calories from fat, you should not abuse it, as this can lead to the development of obesity and other diseases.
Palm oil is not banned in the EU. However, the behavior of the manufacturers of this product is cause for concern. Oil palm plantations are being expanded in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Environmental organizations claim that this is why tropical forests, the main habitat of many endangered species, are being cut down.
The World Wildlife Fund supports the production of palm oil, but strongly opposes the policy of many producers: instead of creating new plantations on large areas of land that have already been developed, they clear new forest areas, simply destroying what grows on them.
To support the movement against deforestation, many European manufacturers have begun to produce products with a palm oil-free label.
This environmental move was interpreted by many as a move away from palm oil due to its alleged health risks. In particular, this measure contributed to the emergence of myths in Russia about the dangers of palm oil.
Which are provoked, among other things, by the action of trans isomers of fatty acids.
If palm oil is banned, as some are pushing for, the use of hydrogenated fats will increase. This, in turn, will lead to an increase in cancer and cardiovascular diseases.
Fake meat, insects or algae? Perhaps in the near future the restaurant menu will look like this. Food of the future is one of the important topics of the economic forum in Davos, which took place last week. “Ogonyok” found out what we will eat.
“Food crisis”, “Synthetic food”, “Availability of food in the future”, “Liquid gold: the economics of water” - all these are the topics of the Davos sections. The main reason not even for anxiety, but for panic is the growing population globe. By 2030, it could reach 8.5 billion people, which would require increasing food availability by 60 percent. The second alarming factor is climate change, which is changing the geography of agriculture. This is stated in a recent report by scientists from the Oxford Food of the Future program. "We need to produce more food, but 24 percent of all land used for Agriculture, are exhausted,” says program director Charles Hadfry.
"Food production has a negative impact on environment“,” continues Charles Gadfray, “30 percent of greenhouse gases are directly or indirectly associated with food production. As food becomes more difficult to produce, food prices will rise by 40 percent by 2050. If negative global warming scenarios come true, they will increase by 100 percent."
The solution is to produce more nutritious food with fewer resources. "We need to replace animal food to vegetable. The population of the Earth is growing, and it is simply impossible to produce such an amount of meat,” Zinaida Medvedeva, head of the Healthy Nutrition research center, explained to Ogonyok.
Good news: cultured meat is on the way. A test tube cutlet is a long-standing dream of not only vegetarians, but also environmentalists. After all, the production of such steaks requires much less resources than raising a whole animal. If when fattening a bull, you have to spend 23 calories of plant food to produce meat calories, then in a test tube - only three. Artificial beef requires 10 times less water than natural beef, and 100 times less space. These are the calculations of the Californian company Memphis Meats, which plans to produce artificially grown beef, pork and chicken.
The technology is as follows: muscle stem cells are taken from animals, and full-fledged muscles are grown from them in vitro. In February 2016, Californians presented the first artificial meatball to the public. So far this is an expensive pleasure - 18 thousand dollars apiece. But this is already much better than the first test tube burger in history, grown in 2013 in Holland, which cost $330,000. Now the creator of that first burger, Mark Post, has founded the Mosa Meat company and promises to market patties for $11 apiece in a few years. The key problem with such meat is the lack of fat. The muscle fibers themselves taste bland, and scientists have not yet figured out what to do about it.
Meanwhile, Maurice Benjaminson of Touro College in New York managed to grow fish fillets in the laboratory. Here they used a different approach, without any stem cells: they took goldfish fillets, placed them in a special nutrient solution, in which the tissue began to grow.
Silicon Valley startup Impossible Food specializes in plant-based foods that mimic meat and cheese. The idea is not new, but the head of the company, Patrick Brown, relied on a scientific approach. Having come to the conclusion that hemoproteins are responsible for meat taste and aroma, he began to look for them in plants and found them in soybean nodules. These substances are extracted from soybeans and added to a plant-based burger, which was included in the menu of four American restaurants last year.
The fact that artificial burgers are not fantasies, but a gastronomic reality, is evidenced by the appetites of Google, which wanted to buy a startup for $300 million. Brown refused the deal - the 108 million needed for the project was given to him by Bill Gates, Viking Global Investors, Horizons Ventures and other investors.
“Another promising area is algae,” says Zinaida Medvedeva. “One American company has developed a new type of algae, which, when fried, tastes very similar to fried bacon. The same company has already begun producing spaghetti from algae.”
But an even more valuable storehouse of nutrients is insects. In China, Southeast Asia and some African countries this was understood a long time ago, but so-called entomophagy was not practiced in Europe. But everything seems to be ahead. Four years ago, a group of scientists from the Dutch University of Wageningen found that mealworm larvae are four times more efficient than cows in terms of their ability to gain weight per kilogram of feed. True, chickens are almost as good as them. But insects have less of a greenhouse effect and they need much less space. And industrial designer Katharina Unger presented the concept of a home mini-farm for growing edible fly larvae - a home source of cheap protein.
However, the product, developed in 2013 by American programmer Rob Rinehart, frees us from the need to eat at all. Just dilute and drink a cup of powder called Soylent. The name comes from combining two English words: soybean - soybean and lentil - lentil. What the powder actually consists of is a trade secret. Rob claims that it contains all the nutritional elements a person needs every day. He “sat” on Soylent for a month and remained healthy and happy with life. True, The Guardian journalist, who repeated the experiment, complained of hunger, irritability and fatigue. But the fact that powder nutrition is the future is also evidenced by competing products. This, for example, is an organic Ambronite cocktail made from chopped berries and nuts, but it is much more expensive than “soy” happiness.
New products are already coming into use, and, quite possibly, some people will even like them.
The product, developed in 2013 by American programmer Rob Rinehart, frees us from the need to eat at all. Just dilute and drink
Expertise
Food doesn't like change
The environment is changing, the lifestyle of modern man is changing. His energy needs are reduced. Therefore, our goal is to reduce the energy component of food, that is, calorie content. Reduce the content of saturated fats, trans fats, salt and at the same time preserve everything useful: essential proteins, vitamins, microelements. That is, food should change as our needs change.
If we look into the future, when it comes to large-scale exploration of space or the depths of the sea, then perhaps completely different food and new food sources will be needed. Academician Pokrovsky developed powdered food in the last century. We talked about food from a tablet that you can put, so to speak, in the microwave and get a ready-made meal. There were ideas for special devices in the form of patches or chips that determine our needs and supply the necessary nutrients (see “Details”).
But if we talk about ordinary life, then all human organs and systems must function fully in accordance with their tasks. And the digestive and excretory systems as well. Therefore, in its recommendations, WHO has now placed the consumption of vegetables and fruits rich in dietary fiber literally in the first positions.
And yet, the field of nutrition is quite conservative, food does not like change, or rather, people are conservative when it comes to food. Therefore, although our table has changed over the last millennium, it has changed significantly less than other areas of life. Most likely, the shape of the products will be the last to change. But the content changes noticeably. There is already a lot of talk about specialized food products, about functional foods, when products are enriched with substances that affect certain functions, for example, have anti-inflammatory properties or an antiatherogenic effect.
When it comes to space exploration or the depths of the sea, they may need completely different food and new food sources.
Dossier
Food for a bright future
Soviet science was no stranger to experiments in the field of cooking. Some of them exceeded even the most daring predictions of current futurologists
Synthetic food
Half a century ago, artificial caviar was made in the USSR - from casein, egg whites and food waste. But the Institute of Organoelement Compounds, which developed it, pursued much more ambitious goals. The head of the research institute, academician Alexander Nesmeyanov, a convinced vegetarian, dreamed of feeding the entire country with synthetic food that would be made directly from oil and gas. The institute's laboratories worked to imitate the taste and texture of a wide variety of foods.
Food made from oil
By the way, there was food made from oil in the USSR, but not for people, but for fattening animals. Since the 1960s, several oil refineries have produced paprin, a protein-vitamin feed concentrate made from yeast. This yeast grew on paraffins from oil production waste. In the late 1980s, paprin production reached a million tons. Then problems emerged: in the places of production, people suffered from asthma. During perestroika, under pressure from environmentalists, the project was curtailed.
Freeze-dried products
Sublimation - vacuum drying of products, preserving all of them beneficial features,” was discovered in Russia even before the revolution. But they used it for the first time before Papanin’s expedition. Institute of Engineers Catering prepared about 5 tons of freeze-dried food for the polar explorers: soups, meat, chicken, vegetables, even pasta. Papanin, however, did not trust sublimates and packed extra dumplings for the trip. Then the technology found application in nutrition for astronauts.
Details
Haute cuisine
New culinary technologies are being tested now
Burger robot
Assembled by startups from San Francisco, the machine can replace the kitchen of a small fast food restaurant. Cheese, minced meat, and whole vegetables are loaded into the robot’s containers, and the machine cuts, fries and serves everything that is needed. On average, one burger takes 10 seconds. Quality and hygiene are top notch.
3D printer
They are trying to adapt 3D printing for cooking, not without success. It is especially good at printing cookies and chocolate. But hydrocolloid printing technology, developed at Cornwall University, makes it possible to use any product as a raw material. And in the depths of NASA they created a printer for astronauts, capable of printing even pizza.
Self-assembled patch
American scientists together with the military are developing a patch that can transmit under the skin nutrients. It is equipped with a chip that analyzes the body's needs and releases nutritional components from its reserve. The patch will help fight fatigue or hunger when there is no time to be distracted by food. Development is planned to be completed around 2025.
Automatic recipes
Artificial intelligence is starting to come up with its own dishes. IBM, for example, teaches how to prepare its self-learning neural network Watson. It is enough to indicate some of the ingredients, the program selects the rest, as well as the cooking method. The recipes, however, turn out to be quite extravagant. For example, a cocktail of cider, plum and fried bacon...
Briefing
The world's population is growing. Due to climate change and overproduction, water will become less and less accessible and will turn into a kind of luxury. The time is not far off when shops selling only water will appear on the central streets. There you can buy water without pesticides, herbicides, metals, or hormones. There will be luxury water, deionized water and even gold-enriched water. You will buy a bottle of good water on the way to visit, just like you buy a bottle of wine now.
SCIENTIFIC RATIONALE FOR THE USE OF VEGETABLE OILS (INCLUDING PALM OIL) IN INFANT FOOD - RESULTS OF RECENT INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH
© Medvedev Oleg Stefanovich12, Medvedeva Zinaida Olegovna2
1 Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosova, 119192, Moscow, Lomonosovsky pr. 27
2 National Research Center “Healthy Nutrition”, 121059, Moscow, PO Box 46. E-mail: [email protected]
Key words: baby food; palmitic acid; Palm oil.
All medical and pediatric recommendations strongly recommend breastfeeding children up to at least 6 months of age. Breastfeeding reduces the risk of developing gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases, otitis media, prevents the development of food allergies, and reduces the likelihood of developing childhood obesity.
However, in some cases, breastfeeding is impossible for medical reasons, due to lack of breast milk in the mother, which requires the use of breast milk substitutes in the form of infant formula. The creation of baby food that is completely equal to breast milk is not yet possible due to technological difficulties and the presence of a huge amount of biologically active substances in breast milk. active substances with a short life time. The use of cow's milk was not very successful due to differences in carbohydrate and protein composition(cow's milk contains predominantly casein, while breast milk contains whey protein), and also contains fats.
At birth, the child's body consists of 13-15% adipose tissue, in which saturated palmitic acid (C16:0) makes up 45-50%. By the 4-5th month of life, adipose tissue already makes up 25% of body weight. Maximum speed the growth of adipose tissue can reach 400 g/month during this period. During the first months of life, a child receives 10% of all calories from breast milk in the form of palmitic acid (PA), which makes up about 20% of all fatty acids. Absorption of PC in children is about 74%
The main difference between breast milk triglycerides and vegetable oils (including palm oil (PM)) is that breast milk (PM) (16:0) contains mainly (70-75%) in the second position of sn-2 triglyceride, and in PM - in the sn-1 and sn-3 positions in the triglyceride molecule. Lipases of the stomach and intestines primarily cleave the extreme bonds in the triglyceride molecule in sn-1 and sn-3, releasing free PC, which is capable of binding calcium and magnesium ions, reducing their absorption and causing constipation. In the case of breast milk, after the cleavage of extreme fatty acids from the triglyceride molecule, monoglyceride with PC remains, which is easily absorbed in the intestine.
Therefore, for the production of baby food, PM is transesterified from the natural position of PCs sn-1 and sn-3, to the sn-2 position, creating a triacylglyceride structure more similar to that of human milk.
Recently published the results of a multicenter clinical trial on 171 children, of whom 57 were breastfed, 57 received traditional infant formula, in which only 13% of the PC was in the sn-2 position, while in the third group of 57 children 43% of the PC was located at the sn-2 position. At weeks 6, 12, and 24 of the study, anthropometric parameters, stool counts, saponified fats, and PC were measured. It was shown that breastfed children had the best absorption of milk components, which was expressed in the smallest dry stool weight per day, a loss of 88 mg/day PC, while in groups on artificial feeding with the standard mixture - 716 mg/day of PC, and in the group with a high content of PC in the sn-2 position - only 316 mg/day. Thus, it has been proven that the use of infant formulas with higher levels of PC at the sn-2 position brings them closer to the properties of breast milk. Typically, such products are obtained by transesterification of PC-rich palm oil.
MATERIALS OF THE CONGRESS “HEALTHY CHILDREN - THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY”
Today, palm oil evokes extremely negative associations among most Russian mothers: poor quality and harmful product, it is added to reduce the cost of production; palm oil is not absorbed by the child due to high temperature melting, it was banned in Europe long ago. These and other myths sometimes have to be dispelled not only among parents, but also among doctors, based on the results of scientific research.