2007-10-17 09:38:01
By Clare Murphy
Health reporter, BBC News
Cake maker Mr Kipling's at it, and so is a growing section of the food
industry.
Transforming the constitution of food, or "reformulating" as it is known, is
increasingly seen as a key plank in the campaign against obesity. If we can't
give up the cakes, the cakes will have to change, the thinking goes.
Industry is starting to move relatively quickly on this front: keen to respond
to changing consumer demands for "healthier" products and to protect itself
from allegations of fuelling fatness.
At one end of the spectrum, companies are quite simply cutting the amount of
unhealthy saturated fats in their food: Walker's Crisps for instance was lauded
for starting to cook its crisps in sunseed oil instead of standard cooking fat,
slashing the saturated content.
But at the other end, researchers are formulating products which the body
processes in quite different ways, taking longer to digest and so keeping you
full for longer.
Plus and minus
Taking fat or sugar out of food is not necessarily as straightforward as it
sounds.
The product may simply not sit together properly - it is hard for instance to
make ice cream bind without sugar, or pastry and chocolate without certain
quantities of fat.
REFORMULATED PRODUCTS INCLUDE:
Cakes
Chips
Butter
Crisps
Soft drinks
Cheeses
And rather than making it healthy, you could actually make it positively
dangerous, the Food Standards Agency warns.
Taking too much saturated fat out of meat pies for example can affect the way
the water reacts with the meat, and increase the risk of food poisoning. The
same is true of cake mixture.
Take too much fat out of cheese and it won't do the things that consumers like
it to do, such as bubble, melt and go brown.
Worst of all, it may end up not tasting like cheese, and researchers are agreed
that if these products are to work, and genuinely reduce the nation's
waistlines, they must be virtually indistinguishable from that which they are
supposed to emulate.
Tastes like butter
Premier Foods, which makes Mr Kipling new reduced fat cakes, has its own
laboratory working out the science behind reformatting foods.
But the public sector is also heavily involved. The Formulation Engineering
Research Centre at the University of Birmingham has been looking at how you
replicate the taste and texture of fats.
One particularly promising avenue is the mushroom. It produces hydrophobins,
air cells which protect the fungus from water, but which appear to have the
same material properties as oil. And yet they have no calories.
Because there are no legal constraints around using mushroom extract in food -
it is already widely available - this is an ingredient which could be "applied
across the whole board very soon", said Professor Ian Norton.
"It would be suited to anything that is fabricated - mayonnaises, sauces,
ice-creams, anything which has a fat content - the texture and taste would be
the same and the calorie content dramatically reduced."
Little by little
But one of the long recognised problems of low-fat foods is how they are used:
the fewer the calories, the more you can eat, the mantra goes for some. Others
add so much sugar that the calorie content is ultimately not far off that which
they were meant to replace.
Scientists are therefore looking into creating foods that actually change the
way the stomach empties.
Adding components used in some acid reflux remedies is one option, as these
appear to provide a barrier which slows the rate of digestion down.
But there may be limits to how much the consumer will stomach.
Alongside the increasing demand for healthier options is a renewed emphasis on
the "natural". This is thought to explain a rise in butter sales in recent
years over those of margarine, seen by many as a "chemical" product.
Reformulated food is in any case not the only answer to Britain's obesity woes.
"There's also a very important psychological issue too," says Professor Norton.
"Changing the food is only one part of it, you've got to change the whole range
of attitudes towards food too."