A team from UL aims to remove salt from our diet by developing low-salt convenience foods that still taste good, writes Mireia Pomar
With today's frenetic lifestyle people have less time to prepare meals at home, so they increasingly opt to purchase ready-made meals. Some of these meals contain excessive amounts of salt and sodium, an important risk-factor in cardiovascular disease.
A team of Irish scientists has decided to investigate how to reduce salt in these products, retaining the taste of processed foods while maintaining a healthier salt content. The group from the University of Limerick (UL) is involved in a three-year project to reduce the sodium intake in our diets. The project received funding worth €450,000 from the Department of Agriculture-supported Food Institutional Research Measure programme.
The study will look at how to reduce salt in a number of processed foods, especially those most popular with consumers, ethnic meals such as Italian, Indian and Mexican, says the director of the new food science and health degree at UL, Dr Martin Wilkinson.
"We can reduce the sodium very quickly by just reducing the amount that goes into the formulation," he says. "However salt is in there for very good reasons. One is safety, as it is very good at destroying bacteria. The second is taste, and the third one in some cases is texture, because salt especially for bread manufacture is required for texturalising," Wilkinson states.
"To ensure that the products are safe and taste well, we have to be sure that when we reduce the sodium, bacteria are not there hanging around in a suspended state that we call a "viable but non-culturable (VBNC) state", he says.
UL's project aims to reformulate ready-made products with a lower sodium content, but also to develop new methods to identify VBNC bacteria without losing taste properties.
"Firstly we are going to examine new products that we make with a reduced salt content for bacteria, especially the VBNC bacteria," states Wilkinson. "We are using a technique called flow cytometry, which is a very rapid technique that can identify bacteria by detecting their DNA," he says. "Flow cytometry is also a technique that will allow us to detect other bacterial populations, so we are going to try to assure food safety."
His goal is also to prevent foods becoming bland. "We are going to try to replace the salt content using spices for example, as they also have antibacterial properties," Wilkinson says. "For example garlic is a well-known antibacterial agent, also peppers and paprika. These types of products can also provide an antibacterial action."
UL is working in collaboration with other teams, and expects to complete the project within three years. "In the University of Limerick we are going to look at the VBNC bacteria and flow cytometry applications," says Wilkinson. "The dairy product research centre at Moorepark, Co Cork, is going to produce reduced sodium cheeses. We are also working with Dawn Fresh Foods, a major manufacturer of ready-made meals in Ireland, who are helping to formulate the foods," he says.
"Finally we are working with the National Food Centre in Dublin, who are looking at the taste properties in low sodium foods and also they are going to help us with the processing side," he says.
The researchers believe they will be able to reduce the amount of sodium in processed meals, assuring that the products are safe from bacteria while still tasting good. They want consumer confidence that the product is safe and healthy, but also the confidence of the food industry as regards safety and also that the salt reduction has not modified the taste.
Sodium alters blood pressure, but there are other diseases such as gastric cancers or asthma that are linked to the consumption of salt.