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New concepts in biological evaluation of novel protein foods
Author(s) -
Miller Sanford A.
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
journal of the american oil chemists' society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.512
H-Index - 117
eISSN - 1558-9331
pISSN - 0003-021X
DOI - 10.1007/bf02671436
Subject(s) - organism , biochemical engineering , function (biology) , food products , risk analysis (engineering) , toxicology , microbiology and biotechnology , biology , computer science , food science , medicine , engineering , evolutionary biology , paleontology
Abstract Technology has advanced to where it is now possible to fabricate new foods having high acceptability and providing better nutrient balance than the traditional foods they replace. If such products ultimately represent a major portion of the diet, then a new approach to toxicology and nutritional evaluation has to evolve to allow proper estimation of the safety and adequacy of the products. Traditional approaches to these problems are based upon the elucidation of major changes in the test organism, i.e., evaluation of substances of high biological potency. For food analogs, any deleterious effect will probably be at levels just above the natural noise level of the system. To compensate for this, most traditional evaluations of analogs have been made by feeding the test substances at extremely high, nonphysiological levels with the hope that this will reveal any toxic response. With this approach, however, many traditional foods would appear to be inadequate. A better technique may be designed to explore the functional consequences of feeding the test analog over several generations, using stress as a modifier to increase sensitivity of the system. Other sensitive measures such as behavior and resistance to disease should be included. The conceptual basis of this approach was used to test a vegetable protein analog (VPA). The feeding of VPA to animals as a significant part of the diet resulted in no change in the capacity of the animal to grow and reproduce and to function under stress conditions. Preliminary results of feeding this material through three generations also produced no changes in the parameters studies.