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Food of the future: Fermented and sustainable

/in ISAPP Science Blog /by KC

By Dr. Mary Ellen Sanders, ISAPP Executive Science Officer

An exciting research initiative at the crossroads of fermented foods and sustainable diets is underway. Funded by the EU and Switzerland, and coordinated by KU Leuven in Belgium, HealthFerm is a 4-year, 13.1 MM € project involving 23 partners from 10 countries. Prof. Christophe Courtin, KU Leuven, serves as the overall project coordinator.

HealthFerm seeks to understand how to transition toward more sustainable, healthy diets through leveraging fermented foods and technologies. Its overall aim is to understand the interaction between food fermentation microbiomes, fermented plant-based foods, the human gut microbiome and human health. Many information gaps will be addressed by the project, which is organized around six work projects that are designed to integrate basic research, intervention studies, fermentation technology, consumer behavior and communication strategies.

Scientific perspectives on fermented food is at the heart of HealthFerm. Fermented foods were defined in an ISAPP consensus paper as ‘foods made through desired microbial growth and enzymatic conversions of food components’. Predating ancient Egyptian society, fermented foods and beverages are thought to have originated over 8000 years ago, and today over 5000 varieties are enjoyed around the globe, contributing substantially to human nutrition. Fermented foods have many advantages over the raw materials from which they are made, including improved sensory characteristics, safety and stability as well as potential health benefits. How the live microbial components of fermented foods may drive the health benefits of fermented foods is an active area of research.

Prof. Courtin shares some of his thoughts about HealthFerm.

Why focus on fermentation as a means of attaining more sustainable diets?

Courtin: When considering a sustainable diet, we automatically look at replacing part of our animal-based foods with plant-based foods. But plant biomass is often less functional and more recalcitrant than animal-based materials. Look for example at the whipping behavior of egg proteins or the availability of iron. Getting more out of plant fiber through fermentation is also a point of attention. In short, we believe that fermentation can help us functionalize plant materials and make it more nutritious.

 

Fermented foods have been around a long time. Why do you think now is the time to leverage their benefits?

Courtin: Societies are increasingly interested in fermented foods for a large number of reasons. We want to leverage that. From a scientific point of view, state-of-the-art omics-technologies coupled with bioinformatics allow us to look in depth into food microbiomes better than ever before and use them in a targeted way to functionalize plant materials. In addition, they also allow performing human intervention trials and doing relevant analyses to understand if and how fermented foods can improve human health, focusing on the gut microbiome and cardiometabolic health.

 

Looking ahead, what is your greatest hope for the project?

Courtin: I hope we can come to a rational design of new fermentation processes and products for the crops we target (faba bean, yellow pea, wheat, oats), using microbial resources we mobilize in collaboration with citizens and companies through community science projects. I also hope we get clear results and mechanistic insights from the intervention trials on the effects of consuming fermented foods and diets.

 

ISAPP is represented on the HealthFerm Stakeholder Board, which convened its first meeting January 20, 2023.

 

Probiotics, Prebiotics and Globobiotics!

/in Consumer Blog, featured, ISAPP Science Blog /by ISAPP

By Prof. Colin Hill, PhD, APC Microbiome Ireland, University College Cork, Ireland

Growing up I could not imagine what the world would look like in 2020, but I was convinced it would be amazing. The future was exciting, new planets and solar systems would be explored, diseases would be cured, and everyone would have sufficient food and shelter.  I sometimes think my generation may have been born at the most perfect time in human history (for someone brought up in a first world country at any rate).  We avoided the major world wars which our parents and grandparents endured, we had the benefits of cheap airfares so we could travel the world as tourists, not as armies. Oil was cheap and plentiful. Access to education was widely available. We benefited from antibiotics while they were still effective.  Gender inequalities and racism began to be addressed, even though there is still a long way to go. Computers became commonplace and the internet provided access to almost unlimited sources of information.

But here we are in 2020, and now things do not look so promising. Perhaps cynicism is a natural by-product of getting older, but now the future seems to be presented in apocalyptic terms. Climate change, antibiotic resistance, ageing populations, the paradoxes of increasing obesity and increasing hunger, exploding populations, depletion of natural resources and pollution of our oceans. Watching nature programmes hosted by the incomparable David Attenborough has changed from generating a sense of awe at the wonders of the natural world to a sense of despair as to what we are doing to it. Australia is literally on fire as I write this!  Can our planet survive the onslaught of the projected 10 billion humans by 2050 – each one hungry for a share of finite resources?  Is this really going to be the legacy from my generation to the next – a dystopian future without hope and optimism?

But it’s a New Year and a new decade, and I really want to be hopeful. I am encouraged by the fact that we are gradually beginning to come to grips with this new reality. The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a roadmap guiding societies and individuals as to how to make a contribution. Attitudes are changing.  Too slowly for sure, but we do seem to be at a tipping point.

But what has this tirade have to do with prebiotics and probiotics, you may ask? Well, everything of course. One of the things that really gives me hope is our growing understanding of how humans are simply occupying space in a microbial world. If we squander our opportunity and destroy our planet in terms of human habitation, microbes will carry on for billions of years to come. We should remember that we can only live on Earth because all of the oxygen we breathe is the result of billions of years of microbial metabolism, that most of the carbon cycling on earth is due to microbes, and that every natural system on Earth depends on microbes. Of course we are also inhabited by a vast ecosystem of microbes (our microbiomes) that are required for our health and wellbeing, and we live in environments shaped by microbes. Understanding this will help us to live in harmony with our microbial world, rather than constantly forcing our poor planet to deliver our short term needs.

How can microbes help us to achieve sustainability and restore a healthy ecosystem? I believe that there are many opportunities. By 2050 I predict that we will be using microbes to restore productivity to land damaged by excessive use and pollution.  We will be using microbes to clean our oceans of plastic waste. We will improve food production without using chemicals, and we will have certainly reduced food waste (it is estimated that one third of all the food we produce on earth is lost to spoilage, much of it caused by microbes). We will have reduced methane emissions by manipulating the rumen microbiome in domesticated ruminants. We can look forward to a world where we can work with microbes to restore and replenish our atmosphere by unlocking the enormous potential of microbes to scavenge and store carbon. We will have reduced our reliance on antibiotics and will have found microbiome-friendly solutions to prevent and treat infection. We will have developed probiotics and prebiotics that will help us to address metabolic diseases, we will be using bacteriophage to sculpt microbiomes, while psychobiotics will be helping to prevent age related loss of brain function.

Given that the world is a microbial ecosystem, I propose that in the same way we can treat our human ecosystems with prebiotics and probiotics to improve or restore health, we can think in terms of developing microbial solutions to improve or restore planetary health. Because we haven’t had one in at least a month, I propose yet another new term; globobiotics. Globobiotics would be defined as “live microorganisms, microbial products or substrates selectively utilized by microorganisms, that are used in a manner that contributes to the sustainability of our planet”.

We’ve had the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Oil Age, the Atomic Age and the Information Age, welcome to the Microbial Age!