Eat your way to health and happiness

'You are what you eat is an important concept at Teagasc's Moorepark research centre.

Scientists there want everything you eat to carry some extra benefit, with every mouthful contributing to general health. Work towards this goal received a fillip last week with the opening of Moorepark's biotechnology food centre. The €6 million facility will employ 40 and will seek to add value to Irish food products by making them better for us.

"One of the main things we are looking at is constituents of food that have a positive effect on health," says the head of the centre, Prof Paul Ross. "We are looking for bioactive substances in food that positively influence human health."

The new centre is part of a "re-tooling plan" brought in by Teagasc five years ago, he says. It wanted to target "key strategic areas for the agricultural industry and one of those was biotechnology", he explains. Teagasc used its own resources to build the centre, provided via the Department of Agriculture and Food. Minister Mary Coughlan officiated at the formal opening last Friday.

"It is a food and animal biotechnology centre," says Ross. "What drove the centre from the start is food for health, adding value to food and in particular to dairy products." The centre will also be involved in food safety and animal biotech research.

"The main driver of the centre was the need to move towards added value and away from commodities," he explains. The new accession countries are major producers of cheap agricultural commodities, making it difficult for Ireland to compete on a price basis. We had to find a different approach if Irish food products were to remain competitive, he says.

"We are under pressure to add value to our food portfolio," he states and one way to do this was through biotechnology. The centre will study new ways to add health benefits to the foods we eat. "Some say that all foods will be functional foods in 10 years' time."

The centre has five large laboratories, two of which will provide a home for the Cset (Centre for Science Engineering and Technology) won jointly by Moorepark and University College Cork via its Bioscience Institute and the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre.

The Cset is one of the largest yet awarded by Science Foundation Ireland and is worth €16.5 million in State funds and another €4.5 million of industrial support. All of this will be spent over the next five years in pursuit of new discoveries in food biotechnology.

The idea that a person might be able to eat themselves healthy is more than just a notion. "One third of cancers are thought to be diet related," he says. "It is all based on foods and health. We want to come up with food for the future that will positively influence health."

The work is already well under way. Moorepark and UCC are studying a food-based enzyme inhibitor that can block Ace (angeotensin-converting enzyme), a protein that causes blood vessels to constrict. This could become an important addition to foods able to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by lowering blood pressure.

Ross's team is looking at natural peptides in milk that can kill harmful bacteria and another anti-microbial peptide that can wipe out oral pathogens, something that could help reduce tooth decay.

Another important study involves a substance found in food bacteria that prevents colon cancer cells from spreading.

Remarkably these developments are based on finding novel substances in milk, whey, yeasts and other food products. The benefits will come in improved health but also in new opportunities for our food industry.

"It is a big investment and it is high risk too," says Ross. "There is a high expectation on us to develop products in this area. The amount of value this can add to food is enormous."