Dinner Takes All

Written By Caitlin Crawshaw

Some hungry consumers are gambling that functional foods and nutraceuticals may improve health and reduce disease.

At any plain-Jane grocery story in Alberta – the type where you won’t find yoga supplies or Swiss chard – a dozen kinds of juice taunt you from a cooler.

Scan the row: orange juice with calcium, reduced-acid OJ, vegetable juice, organic strawberry juice. Your eye wanders to a blood-red beverage in a curvaceous, plastic bottle. Pomegranate juice. A decorative label claims the juice is rich in antioxidants, which fight cancer and aging. At $6 for a half litre bottle, you might raise an eyebrow and leave it on the shelf. But a growing number of Albertans are tossing it into their carts. What’s a few extra dollars to reduce your cancer risk?

While Albertans aren’t known for being overly analytical in the grocery store, they’re becoming increasingly open to purchasing functional foods – even if it means spending more. In fact, it’s a trend that’s boosting research in Alberta’s growing functional food and nutraceuticals sector.

And while some consumers are getting on board, most aren’t identifying the products in their cart as functional foods or nutraceuticals. In fact, many consumers might never have heard the terms.

Functional foods are those which have been shown to offer certain health benefits to consumers. This includes simple foods such as carrots, which naturally contain the antioxidant beta-carotene. Processed foods can be “functional” too. Yogurt, for example, includes digestion-enhancing bacteria. Also in this category are foods with added ingredients, such as milk with added vitamin D or enhanced foods, such as omega-3-enriched pork.

The term “nutraceuticals” is actually an amalgamation of “nutritional” and “pharmaceutical” and refers to products isolated from food and generally sold in medicinal form. Think of fibre supplements or iron-rich spirulina, made from blue-green algae.

“I think consumers today are looking for healthier products overall, and healthier food products,” says Kristina Williams, vice president of marketing and sales for Edmonton’s Natraceuticals Canada (formerly Cevena Bioproducts), creator of Viscofiber.

“They’re looking for healthier food products that taste good, because at the end of the day, they have to taste good or people won’t buy them again. Consumers are willing to pay a little bit of a premium for high-quality products.”

Both functional foods and nutraceuticals provide a non-pharmaceutical means of promoting health, decreasing dangers such as adverse drug interactions. But Williams is quick to caution that Health Canada reg-ulations prevent most products – including Viscofiber – from legally claiming to prevent disease. Rather, they are products that promote health.

While no product is a cure-all, some of Alberta’s nutraceuticals offer notable health benefits.

Created by two University of Alberta agriculture professors, Viscofiber is a very concentrated version of the soluble fibre in barley and oats. Through a proprietary process, the soluble fibre is removed, and separated from the starch and protein.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the benefits of fibre and its ability to improve heart health. Viscofiber claims to do this better than other fibre supplements. Williams explains that during extraction from the grain, soluble fibre can lose some of the molecular properties that give it viscosity (the ability to bind with water). Viscofiber uses a method that maintains its structure, on a molecular level.

Viscosity is key to fibre, since the fibre must attach well to water molecules in your gut to create a soft gel. It’s not  an appetizing image, but the creation of the gel slows your glycemic response (keeps your blood sugar levels steadier), makes you feel fuller, and removes bile acids from your body. This last process removes harmful cholesterol from your bloodstream, suggesting benefits for heart health.

While not exactly a dispassionate third party, the company has tested the health benefits of the product, and found favourable results, including a small study that even connected Viscofiber to weight loss. Sold as both a supplement and food additive, Viscofiber is available to consumers in the U.S. and in Canada. 

Another nutraceutical being developed in Alberta may offer a treatment of sorts for a disease that’s evaded both treatment and cure.

Celiac disease, which affects about one per cent of the North American population, is an immune response to the presence of gluten, found in grains such as rye, barley, wheat and oats. Ingesting foods with even traces of gluten can cause enormous pain to those afflicted, as well as damage their intestines.

A research scientist at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Pharmacy is trying to make life easier for celiac patients. But rather than looking to a drug treatment, Dr. Hoon Sunwoo is investigating a miracle food: eggs. “For thousands of years, people have been eating eggs, but nobody has had harmful effects,” he says. “The egg is a very natural and safe product.”

Sunwoo is creating a compound containing antibodies found in egg yolk – immunoglobulin-y to be specific – which will bind with the gluten to prevent it from being absorbed in the intestine, where it can harm celiac suffers. For these people, this could be a godsend. By adding the supplement to food (or taking it as a capsule or tablet), celiac patients could avoid accidentally digesting gluten, in restaurant food, for instance.

The four-year project is presently in its first year, and will have to undergo much testing by Health Canada before it can be ready for commercialization. But Sunwoo is hopeful that the research can benefit both celiac patients and Alberta’s egg producers. “Hopefully the tests will be okay, so we will produce large amounts of the value-added agri-products to help our poultry people, producers, food processors and celiac patients,” he says.

Sunwoo isn’t the only scientist with an interest in eggs. They’re also a research target for Jianping Wu, an assistant professor in the University of Alberta’s department of agricultural, food and nutritional science. “People are using eggs for so many interesting innovations. We are trying to explore more and see how we can benefit and improve people’s health and quality of life,” he says.

Wu is working on a new way to extract protein and lipids from processed egg yolk without using harmful solvents. These proteins and lipids have many different uses in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food industries as emulsifiers or nutraceutical ingredients, Wu explains. For example, a kind of fat pulled from the egg yolk (called phospholipids) is a good source of a chemical called choline, which is important to human brain development.

Wu is also studying other elements in egg proteins that can help prevent diseases. The beneficial effects of these disease-fighting proteins aren’t always gained by simply eating eggs. The proteins Wu is studying are small and rendered unusable by the digestion process. But they can, perhaps, be added to food or as taken as a nutraceutical. “We are (trying) to mine the proteins in a sequence that can be used for prevention of cardiovascular disease, or even cancer.” Such a sequence could not occur without some processing.

For Wu, the growth of Alberta’s functional food and nutraceutical sector is the result of both government support and consumer demand. It’s a needed trend, he says. “In Canada, the U.S. and many countries, the aging population is increasing. With it, chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and cancer are getting higher and higher. And I don’t think that pharmaceuticals can treat all of these diseases,” he says. “People realize that a lot of these chronic diseases relate to people’s lifestyles – and the food they eat is a major part.”

Ruurd Zijlstra, an associate professor and feed industry research chair in the University of Alberta’s department of agricultural, food and nutritional science, is optimistic that consumers’ growing interest in functional foods will help the suffering pork industry. While demand for pork is good, producers are struggling due to increased costs, he explains.

“There’s a lot of pressure on the producer relative to feed costs and relative to the prices that they can get for their commodity products in the marketplace,” he says. As a result, researchers like Zijlstra are looking for ways to add value to pork. His research focuses on pork that contains omega-3 fatty acids.

These are considered essential fatty acids, and are associated with brain development and heart health. Omega-3 is normally found in flax seed, fish and some other sources.

Zijlstra is investigating feeding flax to pigs to increase their omega-3 profile. His work involves determining how much flax pigs must eat, as well as how omega-3 pork benefits both consumer health and the health of the animals, which may in turn reduce animal care costs.

It seems like it’s shaping up to be a win-win-win situation for the pigs, consumers and producers, who can fetch a higher price for their commodity by selling to a niche market. “The majority of the people, or certainly half of the people, (purchase by) price strictly, but there’s also a category of people out there who are willing to pay more than the average price if it is animal welfare friendly, antibiotic free, omega-3 containing,” he says.  

Those on the other side of the fence, vegetarians, are also benefiting from the functional food boom. In Barrhead, Natural Farmworks has developed Rubisco, a vegetable protein product that hit the shelves of health-food stores late December, 2007. The product, made from the leaves of plants before they’ve gone to seed, contains a high level of protein, explains Brad McNish, company president and co-owner.

He explains that since the 1700s, scientists have recognized the protein contained in green leaves. “Every advanced species needs protein in its diet, and it’s amazing how many species on Earth are supported by protein that comes exclusively from the leaves of a plant,” he says.

This is the most abundant protein on the face of the Earth, but since people can’t possibly eat enough green leaves to get most of their protein (leaves are primarily fibre and water, after all), it’s never been a major source for humans.

McNish and his business partner, Lori Wheeler, say they’ve discovered a process for concentrating plant leaf protein, in a way that preserves its vitamin and mineral content.

While people have known that heating the juice from leaves can create a protein-rich coagulate (the non-governmental organization called Leaf for Life has long taught African women how to improve their family’s nutrition this way), Natural Farmworks preserves the vitamin content, which degrades at high temperatures.

Rubisco is well tolerated by the body, and comprises leaf protein from a number of plants – including spinach, pea, barley, wheat and Alfalfa – all grown by the company and shipped into a Barrhead  manufacturing plant by the truckload.

McNish points out that most of the world gets the majority of their protein from plant sources, while North Americans get 65 per cent of their protein from meat. He’s not a vegetarian himself, but believes in the benefits of plant-based protein – and the harm caused by poor North American diets.

McNish recalls people-watching – and noting the abundance of corpulent travellers on his most recent airline journey. “All you have to do is stand in any airport and you can see what it’s is doing to our population.”  

Food adds value

Canada is a global hotspot for the development of nutraceuticals and functional foods. Meet
 a few of Alberta’s up-and-coming examples, finding their way to grocery shelves near you.

• Dr. Sim’s Designer Eggs – By feeding chickens a special diet, University of Alberta professor and IGY Inc. member Dr. Jeong Sim created The Canadian Designer egg, which is high
  in omega-3 fatty acids, and now sold across the world.
• SpiceGuard – Another product by Dr. Jeong Sim. Derived from eggs, this food additive/food preservative keeps bacteria from growing on the surface of food. www.igybiotech.com
• Viscofiber – Using techniques that don’t damage the molecular structure of the fibre, Natraceutical Canada produces a highly concentrated, soluble fibre that decreases glycemic response and lowers cholesterol. www.cevena.com
• Rubisco – Made from the green leaves of plants, Rubisco is highly concentrated leaf protein. It’s high in vitamin D and iron, contains a full complement of amino acids and offers an alternative to soy protein for vegetarians and health-conscious Albertans.  www.naturalfarmworks.net
• Sinoveda herbal supplements – Local company Sinoveda applies a pharmaceutical approach to nutraceuticals, claiming to offer more potent varieties of ginseng, ginko biloba and echinacea. www.naturesnutraoils.com
• Nature’s Nutraceuticals – This Brooks, Alberta, operation sells a variety of cold-pressed flax seed products. www.naturesnutraoils.com