A healthier process? Roberta Claro da Silva is seeking a safe, natural and low-cost fat substitute that can promote human well-being.A healthier process?
Arnab Bhowmik, Ph.D., director of the college’s Soil Sustainability Lab, takes a quick peek at one of his field samples.
Call it the paradox of the American diet.
Americans have more information about food and nutrition than ever before — about where and how food is grown, about what’s in foods, about foods that can make people look and feel better.
Despite this wealth of information, Americans are dying from their diets. Because of diets full of salt, processed foods and sugar-filled sodas, nearly three-quarters of American adults are overweight. Poor diets are blamed for more than 300,000 annual deaths from diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and more than 80,000 new cases of cancer in the United States each year.
If Americans won’t change their eating habits — and if Americans trapped in food deserts have no better dietary options — the solution might be to make processed foods healthier. Building on previous research on a relatively new fat substitute known as oleogels, CAES professor Roberta Claro da Silva, Ph.D., is developing a functional nutrition delivery system that promotes health and fight disease with the foods that people routinely eat.
“People know more about nutrition than ever, but they don’t give up processed foods,” Silva said. “My research is aimed at creating a natural, low-cost and versatile way of improving the healthiness of processed foods so consumers can have access to a better diet.”
Silva, an assistant professor of food and nutritional science, came to North Carolina A&T State University in 2018 after nearly two years at Utah State University, where she was a postdoctoral researcher. She earned three degrees, including her doctorate in food technology, from the Universidade de São Paulo, the largest and most prestigious university in her native Brazil.
A lipid chemist, Silva is seeking healthier substitutes for fat, an essential building block of the human diet. Solid dietary fats provide much of food’s taste and texture, but trans fats and saturated fats are largely responsible for high rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity. The food industry has experimented with liquid oils and multiple methods to modify lipids but hasn’t yet found a solution that pleases consumers.
Oleogels, meanwhile, promise the best of both worlds. Oleogels are the end product of an emerging technology known as oleogelation, which converts liquid oil into a standalone three-dimensional network. The resulting oleogels are semi-solid gel-like materials loaded with unsaturated fatty acids that have physiochemical qualities similar to saturated fats.
Silva and her team are developing oleogels for a variety of foods, including ice cream, peanut butter and cream cheese. Her latest research project takes the utility of oleogels one step further. Because oleogels can store bioactive materials, it’s possible that oleogels can protect these ingredients through multiple steps involved in processing food. Silva said, this functional delivery system has enormous potential to create a clean label ingredient that can be used in food processing to make healthier food.
Silva is the principal investigator on a project funded by a three-year, $618,000 Evans-Allen capacity grant, a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that supports agricultural research at 1890 land-grant institutions. The project has two co-principal investigators: Salam A. Ibrahim, Ph.D., a research professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences; and Heather L. Colleran, Ph.D.; an associate professor of food and nutritional sciences.
To test her hypothesis, Silva turned to a substance found in turmeric. Turmeric is a plant native to South and Southeast Asia whose roots are boiled, dried, and ground into an orange-yellow powder that’s often added to curries and other foods. Its primary bioactive ingredient is curcumin, which has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. But curcumin has poor bioavailability because the human body absorbs it poorly and metabolizes and eliminates it rapidly.
“Until a bioactive such as curcumin gets to the intestine, it’s not totally absorbed,” Silva said. “Oleogels can project bioactive substances during digestion, which means they can get to the intestine and more of it can be absorbed.”
Silva said she has determined the proper oleogelator and is experimenting with different amounts and formulations of curcumin encapsulated within oleogels. Taste tests with these oleogels baked into a cake mix “have had very good results” with focus groups, Silva said.
The first of three papers stemming from this project will be submitted this fall to the Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society. Silva also is seeking a patent for an oleogel she developed.
The big challenge to widespread adoption will be cost, Silva said. The food industry isn’t interested in high-cost approaches that increase consumer prices. Though the technology to develop oleogel delivery systems is sophisticated, Silva said the process to add oleogels to food doesn’t require expensive high-tech equipment.
“I always say to my students, ‘The challenge lies in thinking simply while doing our work,’” Silva said. “This new technique that we’re exploring is very innovative but at the same time very simple. If we can develop a cost-effective and uncomplicated approach to enhancing the nutritional value of processed food, we can positively impact human health.”
