Update from Turkey on the future of functional food

USB’s ‘Biotech U’ winner (pictured) updates U.S. soybean farmers on what she learned at a Turkish biotech conference

Editor’s Note: The soybean checkoff works to support the acceptance of biotechnology globally, in order to ensure U.S. soybean exports can be sold in every country in the world. As part of that effort, the Biotech Initiative organizes Biotech U, a two-day seminar on the campus of the University of Missouri-Columbia in which journalism students – tomorrow’s reporters on this issue – learn about biotech soybeans and ultimately put their new knowledge to work in a reporting competition. This year’s winner is Lydia Mulvany, who as part of her prize won a trip to a biotechnology conference in Cesme, Turkey, called Novel Approaches in Food Industry International Food Congress. This is Lydia’s way of sharing with U.S. soybean farmers what she recently learned there. This is the second blog posting in a series of three. Look for Lydia’s third posting soon.

This conference featured many very technical presentations, and these were balanced by general overviews of certain emerging areas of research. I think I’d be remiss without describing a few of the more technical presentations I went to (without getting too technical myself), just to give you an idea of the content of the research.

One of the presentations I attended was about a new way to simultaneously identify soybean and poultry content in meats using DNA analysis. The presenter was a scientist named Ergün Şakalar, of Fatih University, Turkey. The identity of meats and other contents in processed food isn’t readily apparent, and adding cheaper ingredients such as chicken or soybeans is common, Şakalar says.

In order to be sure the ingredients in foods match labeling, there needs to be a convenient, economical way to analyze those ingredients. This researcher was improving on a method using real-time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to identify the presence of soy and poultry additions in meat. Currently, you’d have to analyze for poultry and soy separately. With Şakalar’s method, you can test for both simultaneously. His team prepared different meat samples with soy and poultry in different proportions, and got accurate results.

Another research project dealt with the production of isoflavonoids from soy tissue cultures in an airlift bioreactor. The presenter was Alper Gueven, Tunceli University, Turkey. A lot of this session went pretty much over my head. Even the abstract is full of chemicals, acronyms and terms that mean very little to a non-chemist. Like much scientific research, this project was inconclusive as a piece of a larger puzzle: optimum reactor design still needs to be investigated.

What non-scientists can take away, however, is that research like this is contributing to ways of increasing the production of valuable phytochemicals found in plants and aiding in their mass production. This particular experiment concerns the production of isoflavonoids, which researchers have shown to be valuable as anticarcinogens, antioxidants and as helping osteoporosis and cardiovascular diseases. Soybeans happen to be full of isoflavonoids.

The last session I want to write about is a presentation on nutrigenomics and the future of functional food. I’ll just be able to give a rough summary, but I really like this topic. The presenter was Fatma Ekinci—who talked really, really fast. Ekinci is from Yeditepe University, Turkey. This was not about a specific experiment, but more of a conceptual talk outlining the boundaries and directions of functional food research.

Ekinci started out talking about American polls, and how people believe that nutrition pays the greatest role in health, as opposed to exercise or family history. That explains the rise of functional foods, which provide benefits beyond basic nutrition. These can be foods enhanced with certain vitamins; they can be mineral pills or food with omega-3 or probiotics. They promote health and often claim to help fight certain illnesses.

Nutrigenomics should guide the future of functional foods, Ekinci says. This is the study of how different foods interact with particular genes. Nutrigenomics asks the question, how is our gene profile responding to what we’re eating? How are foods influencing our DNA? These studies lead to the concept of personalized nutrition, Ekinci says, and even personalized medicine, since each person can respond to nutrition differently, and “individual genetic variation affects how nutrients are assimilated and metabolized by our bodies.”

Ekinci says nutrigenomics could be especially useful as the public could be more accepting of nutritional solutions (because these are more natural) than drugs for the prevention of diseases. The main goal of the field: improve global health, and in particular, deal with obesity.

As a final note, I had an interesting conversation with Yeditepe University’s Artemis Karaali about biotechnology in Turkey. She says biotech research is just beginning in Turkey, and she’s putting me in touch with some researchers involved in those efforts.

Public opinion in Turkey remains pretty fiercely anti-biotech, from what I’ve read and heard. However, Karaali says the scientific community is divided, and there are some strong pro-biotech voices. Karaali said she herself believes the country shouldn’t remain behind on science. I hope to continue the discussion with Karaali and some other researchers over email, so I’ll send an update on any information I get.