Jochen Weiss, professor of food science at the University of Hohenheim in Germany, is using nanotechnology to fortify foods with nutrients.
Jochen Weiss: A lot of the systems that we’re interested in are where you try to put in omega-3 fatty acids – they have a lot of beneficial functions in terms of health. It’s very difficult to include them in a food system and make sure that they’re still active and that the food still tastes good.
Weiss’s lab has developed a way to encase the omega-3 fatty acids in capsules that are about 2,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Jochen Weiss: If you think about these systems as pills, it would be a very wrong scale of things. We’re trying to put these compounds into very, very tiny systems. They’re so tiny that actually once they’re encapsulated, you wouldn’t even be able to see it.
The nano-sized capsules are tasteless and preserve the active ingredients in the omega-3 fatty acids.
Jochen Weiss: You could put them in a wide variety of foods. You could put them into beverages. The purpose of the encapsulation is to actually make them compatible with a very wide range of food products.
Thanks today to the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service National Research Initiative Program and Cornell University.
Our thanks to:
Jochen Weiss
University of Hohenheim
Germany
That all sounds great, however I think it’s a better idea to just educate people on what foods they should eat and also how to prepare them instead of investing in what could potentially be very expensive technology development. How about using the funds for this research to invest in facilities that grow/raise the foods that already contain these acids. We live in a society of quick fixes and this is simply another one of those.
I usually appreciate the few seconds of science that Earth & Sky brings into my life every day, but today I wasn’t so appreciative. You featured “food scientists” who are trying to stick today’s wonder nutrient into every possible food product that we buy. Please don’t treat nutritionism as if it were science. It’s not. And until we as a society start looking at the larger scale of diet rather than specific nutrients, we will continue to get fatter and sicker.
By featuring this nutritionism garbage on your program, you lend your reputation to a scam which, at this time, needs to be exposed and discredited for what it is… a scam.
The very least that you could do is feature a voice from the other side of the debate, like, say, Michael Pollan.
“A clear voice for science.” Not this time.
Thanks for the comments!
You can listen to EarthSky’s podcasts with Michael Pollan on today’s food at the links below:
Michael Pollan predicts a food culture revolution
Michael Pollan on your eating habits
To be fair to Dr. Weiss, he’s only developing science-based foods that some people, and the markets, want. But they’re definitely not for everyone.
does this mean that other things could be encapsulated and put in our food. things that would be harmful to us?