Ferré & Consulting Blog (English Version)

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, research out this week suggests eating chocolate may have a positive impact on stroke. Don’t go buying too many heart boxes just yet, though, say the study authors.

A new analysis, which involved a review of three prior studies, suggests eating about a bar of chocolate a week can help cut the risk of stroke and lower the risk of death after a stroke. But the evidence is still limited, says study author, neurologist Gustavo Saposnik at St. Michael’s Hospital, University of Toronto.

One study they looked at found that 44,489 people who ate one serving of chocolate per week were 22% less likely to have a stroke than people who ate no chocolate. Another study found that 1,169 people who ate 50 grams of chocolate once a week were 46% less likely to die following a stroke than people who didn’t eat chocolate.

The research appears in this week’s Neurology and will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 62nd annual meeting in Toronto in April.

New chocolate-stroke studies should also take into account age and gender of consumers, says Italo Mocchetti, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University Medical Center. Mocchetti, who has studied flavonoids, says this chemical, which is found in cocoa, is linked to anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties.

The chocolate-health connection is something many clients are interested in, says Katrina Markoff, owner of the premium chocolate line Vosges.

Chocolate, Health Chocolate, cocoa, flavonoids, stroke risk

Cadbury’s dairy milk chocolate will now sport a “Fairtrade” logo on its redesigned packaging, while retaining the smaller block size it switched to last year.

The confectionary maker would also increase the amount of cocoa solids in its product, from 21% to 26%.

All of the ingredients in the company’s nine Cadbury Dairy Milk products that could be certified “Fairtrade” would be, New Zealand managing director Matthew Oldham said.

The move follows widespread criticism of a decision in August last year to switch to using palm oil in its chocolate.

The firm started using palm oil as part of a cost-cutting exercise, which also saw the 150g and 250g bars shed about 20% of their weight.

Palm oil production was responsible for the rapid destruction of rainforest habitats and remained the single greatest threat to the existence of orangutans, and many other South East Asian wildlife species.

Though Cadbury only bought and used certified sustainable palm oil for the brief time it used it in its chocolate, the public had spoken – and wanted the palm oil out, Oldham said.

Cadbury responded to public outcry and changing back to the original recipe the new-look, logo-emblazoned chocolates would be on shelves in time for Easter, he said.

The smaller product size would remain.

The company’s use of Fairtrade product would help improve life for more than 40,000 Ghanaian cocoa farmers, who grew the beans the company used in its chocolate, Mr Oldham said.

Source : Reuters

Chocolate, Companies Cadbury, Chocolate, palm oil

Bakery formulators who use ingredients like glycerol or fats should exercise caution when using sucralose, suggests a new study from Canada.

Researchers from McGill University report that the chloride in sucralose may chlorinate glycerol to produce chloropropanols; potentially toxic compounds. However, questions remain as to whether such compounds would be formed in actual foods.

Speaking to FoodNavigator, lead researcher Dr Varoujan Yaylayan from McGill’s Department of Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry said that the purpose of the new study was to “show in principle” that chloropropanols could be formed if food is heated at high temperatures.

“Food matrix components may promote or hinder this process,” he said. “In order to confirm positively that this reaction can happen under realistic food processing conditions specific experiments should be conducted.

“Our aim was to identify if chlorination in principle can occur,” he added.

According to their results, published in the journal Food Chemistry, sucralose may degrade in the presence of glycerol and generate chloropropanols.

“Caution should be exercised in the use of sucralose as a sweetening agent during baking of food products containing glycerol and or lipids due to the potential formation of toxic chloropropanols,” they added.

Unrealistic and implausible?

The study’s findings were dismissed by sucralose supplier Tate & Lyle as “unrealistic”. A spokesperson for the company told FoodNavigator that the stability of the ingredient, including its stability under heat processing, was rigorously tested as part of the original regulatory petition that submitted and reviewed by regulatory authorities around the world.

“All of these tests proved that sucralose does not break down in typical food processing conditions,” said the spokesperson. “These tests were conducted with actual food products including baked goods.”

The spokesperson added that the conditions used in the McGill study were “wholly unrealistic compared to how sucralose is used within a food matrix.

“It is not scientifically plausible to extrapolate from these tests that this is how sucralose behaves in normal food processing conditions.

“Indeed, the process and shelf stability of sucralose is one of the many reasons why it is the leading high intensity sweetener in the food market and sweetens more than 4000 products world wide,” added the spokesperson.

Bakery

The new study, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), sought to understand the thermal decomposition of sucralose under high temperature environments. Drs Yaylayan and Rahn also studied the “consequences of hydrogen chloride release from sucralose and its ability to chlorinate various food related ingredients such as glycerol to generate chloropropanols”.

The researchers looked at the thermal degradation of sucralose (pyrolysis) at 250 °C in the presence of glycerol “generated significant amounts of 3-monochloropropanediol and 1,2- and 1,3-dichloropropanols based on the relative intensities of their chromatographic peaks which amounted to 15 per cent of the total chromatographic peak area”, they reported.

Dr Yaylayan told this website that the choice of 250 °C was “a little bit higher temperature” than found in many food processes “in order to speed up the reaction”.

A growing concern for foods

Chloropropanols are found in many types of food, said Dr Yaylayan, and that their work was continuing to study chloropropanol formation mechanisms in general, and not specifically sucralose-related.

According to a 2009 report from the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), the major chloropropanol is 3-chloro-1,2-propanediol (3-MCPD). It is known to be present in some bakery products. “3-MCPD is formed when fat- and salt-containing foods are processed at high temperatures during production,” explains the report. Dr Yaylayan worked as co-author on the ILSI “3-MCPD Esters in Food Products” report (to read the ILSI report, please click here .)

‘Scientifically sound’ safety

The safety of sucralose was supported in a recent review paper by an expert panel and published in the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology (Oct. 2009, Vol. 55, pp. 6-12).

The expert panel was convened “because the general public continues to be concerned about the safety of food ingredients, including non-nutritive and nutritive sweeteners, it is important that all safety data regarding food ingredients be made publicly available, and the data should be critically evaluated to assure the public that the conclusions presented are supported by data from properly designed and executed studies,” said the article.

“The extensive safety data of sucralose and maltodextrin have been rigorously evaluated by experts around the world, and the available evidence demonstrates that Splenda, sucralose, and maltodextrin are safe for their intended uses.”

Source: Food Chemistry

Food Safety

The European Commission has announced the winner of its contest to design a new logo to appear on all organic food and beverage products in the European Union: a leaf-shaped design from Germany that attracted 63 per cent of the votes.

The Commission turned to design students to come up with the new logo after the initial insignia was withdrawn for resembling too closely the logo of a supermarket chain. The three shortlisted entries were scrutinised closely to ensure there were no infringements, and some 130,000 people voted online for their favourite.

The winning design comprised twelve stars in the shape of a leaf and is said to be “a very straightforward sign containing two clear messages: Nature and Europe”. It was drawn up by German student Dusan Milenkovic, who receives €6000 in prize money. The identities and nationalities of the three final contenders have not previously been published, to prevent skewing the voting.

Agriculture and rural development commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said: “This exercise has raised the profile of organic food and we now have a logo which everyone will be able to identify with. It’s a nice elegant design and I look forward to buying products carrying this logo from July this year.”

The new logo has to be inserted into the organic farming regulation’s annex in the coming weeks. It will then be compulsory on new organic products as of 1 July 2010, but industry has until 1 January 2012 before labels on all existing products need to be changed. National, region, or private labels will be allowed to appear on packaging alongside the common EU logo.

Not everyone was so delighted with the design, however. Molly Conisbee, director of communications and campaigns at the Soil Association said:

“The Soil Association doesn’t believe the EU logo will address the desire of consumers to know more about the provenance of their food and its journey from the farm to plate, or help to develop a connection between food producer and eater.

We don’t think people who buy organic food are so much concerned about EU origins – as that it was produced to high environmental and animal welfare standards, and is free from GM and harmful additives.”

Richard Jacobs, chief executive of UK control body, Organic Farmers & Growers, told FoodNavigator.com in December:

“As tends to be the case with EU regulation, the timescales are getting tight for implementation. Lead times on new products can be significant and if the logo is adopted only by April or May, it doesn’t give long before the July deadline for its introduction for new products to be suitably labelled.”

Health EU, nutrition labelling, organic logo

By controlling the distribution of sugar in a gelled product, the overall sugar concentration may be lowered without affecting the perceived sweetness, says a new study from Sweden.

The principle focuses on distributing different sugar concentrations in layers of gelatin within a food product, which could lead to a range of reduced-sugar food products like desserts, jellies, and dairy products, according to findings published in Food Hydrocolloids.

The issue of health is no longer a marginal topic for the food industry but wholly mainstream, and it finds confectioners, biscuit and cake makers seeking to juxtapose today’s consumer desire for indulgence with their desire for foods with a healthy profile.

According to a recent study from the US, only 5 per cent of American children between 6 and 11 were overweight before 1980, but 25 years later this number had risen to 19 per cent. Similar increases have been reported in Europe, with the International Association for the Study of Obesity estimating in 2006 that the number of obese school age children in Europe increased by almost 50 per cents since the late 1990s.

The new study, led by Anne-Marie Hermansson from the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, indicates that reduced sugar foods may be achievable by distributing sugar in a structure.

“It is plausible that, when eating and chewing these gels, the receptors initially met different amounts of sugar, which gave higher sweetness intensities for the samples with sugar-rich layers,” wrote the researchers. “As the structures broke down, the sugar distribution evened out; all samples got the same sugar concentration and the differences disappeared.”

Sugar and salt

A similar approach was recently reported by Dutch scientists from the Top Institute Food and Nutrition (TIFN) who developed a technique to reduce salt without adding sodium substitutes, or taste or aroma additives.

Along a similar principle, Hermansson and her co-workers produced layered gelatin gels with the sugar concentration varied throughout the structure. According to their findings, sweetness was detected earlier in a seven-layered sample with the same sugar concentration as a single homogeneous gel.

“The higher sweetness intensity in the seven-layered sample was probably because more sugar met the receptors at biting through this gel,” wrote the researchers.

“It is plausible to believe from our results that gels with the sugar unevenly distributed can give similar sweetness as a homogenous sample, but with a lower sugar concentration,” they added.

Source: Food Hydrocolloids

Confectionery Layered gels, sugar concentration, sweetness

Food manufacturer Unilever has threatened that it may be forced to quit the UK under current financial conditions.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Unilever chief executive Paul Polman said that current business conditions, coupled with increasing taxes and regulations, meant the company could become “non-competitive” in the UK.

Mr Polman explained: “We do have choices where we put research laboratories, choices for manufacturing facilities and choices where we put our senior management. Any responsible businessman needs to continue to assess that within an everchanging global environment.”

It is thought that increasingly rates of corporation tax are driving companies abroad.

The news follows the release of Unilever’s end-of-year results which show sales growth of 3.5 per cent in 2009.

Commenting on the results, Mr Polman said that the company made progress in emerging markets and strengthened its volume growth in Western Europe.

“Our brands are stronger, driven by better quality innovation and a step-change in advertising and promotional expenditure,” he explained.

Companies Unilever