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Credit: Oobli | Oobli aims to rehabilitate sweets by replacing sugar with supersweet proteins made via fermentation.
Midway through a tour of the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, Krishna Kaliannan collapsed. The high school senior’s blood sugar had spiked to dangerously high levels. He landed in the hospital, and doctors diagnosed him with type 1 diabetes.
Kaliannan’s diagnosis forced him to cut out the sugary cereals and cookies he loved to eat as a kid. After eating eggs for breakfast every day for nearly a decade, Kaliannan got tired of his limited options. So he started baking low-carbohydrate cereals using almond flour. The cereals were a hit with friends, and they started asking for more.
In 2017, he turned his baking project into a company: Catalina Crunch. At the start, Kaliannan was hauling suitcases full of ingredients to a commercial kitchen in New York City to bake massive trays of cereal. The company grew, and it now uses industrialized production methods to combine protein isolates, plant fibers, and sugar-free sweeteners into more nutritious versions of processed snacks, without sacrificing flavor. “Consumers aren’t going to eat it if it doesn’t taste good,” Kaliannan says.
Ultraprocessed foods make up more than half the calories in the US diet, according to a 2016 study in BMJ Open, and they’re often loaded with sugar, salt, and saturated fats. Epidemiological studies have linked high consumption of ultraprocessed foods to heart disease, depression, and weight gain.
Experts disagree about how to define ultraprocessed foods. Filippa Juul, a nutrition researcher at New York University, considers food made using ingredients or processes you wouldn’t find in a typical home kitchen to be ultraprocessed. Other scientists, often funded by the packaged food industry, have argued that existing classifications of ultraprocessed foods are too subjective to be useful.
Some researchers say concerns about ultraprocessed food are overblown. But like Catalina Crunch, large food companies are trying to address the health issues associated with ultraprocessed foods. These firms are turning to start-ups developing technologies that reduce the need for added sugar, salt, and saturated fat or boost more desirable nutrients, like protein and fiber.
Not everyone is convinced this approach will work. Some nutritional experts argue that processing itself, not nutrient content, is the real problem. These skeptics say that the best way to reverse the rise of diet-related diseases is to get people to eat more whole foods.
“We have healthy foods. We know which foods are good for us,” Juul says. “The main reason we think we have to invent novel foods is that food companies want to make a bigger profit.”
Most people in the US eat too much added sugar, much of it in ultraprocessed foods, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That has made sugar one of the biggest targets for companies that say they can make processed foods healthier.
The start-up Oobli aims to rehabilitate sweets by replacing sugar with proteins that are thousands of times as sweet as regular sugar. The company’s first product is brazzein, a sweet protein from the oubli fruit in West Africa. Oobli scientists have genetically engineered a strain of yeast to produce the protein, and the company ferments that yeast in bioreactors. The firm says it can use brazzein to remove 70–90% of the sugar in drinks, baked goods, or other foods.
Sugar and artificial sweeteners produce the sensation of sweetness by bombarding the top of the tongue’s taste receptors. But Oobli chief technology officer Jason Ryder says brazzein, a much larger molecule, binds to specific sites on our taste receptors, thus activating a longer-lasting sweetness signal. “It’s the same signal that says sweetness,” he says. “These proteins are so good at tricking your taste receptors into thinking that they’re sugar.”
Other companies are trying to make regular sugar sweeter. The company Resugar adds inulin, a dietary fiber, to sucrose to amplify the sweetness signal, and Incredo boosts the sweetness of sugar by chemically transforming it into a more amorphous crystal structure. This change allows companies to use less sugar to achieve the same amount of sweetness.
Big food companies are slowly starting to test these products. Oobli is working with Grupo Bimbo, the world’s largest baking company, to incorporate brazzein into some products. Meanwhile, Nestlé has tapped Resugar to help reduce sugar in low-calorie ice cream bars, and Blommer Chocolate has used Incredo’s product to halve the sugar content in some chocolates.
The Blommer chocolate on a Jolly Llama frozen yogurt bar cracks apart and then melts just like the coating on a Klondike bar. And the taste is almost indistinguishable. Incredo co-CEO Kelly Thompson says that’s because the company is modifying sugar instead of replacing it. “There’s no background flavors,” she says. “It’s a taste that consumers are very used to.”
Food companies already have a wide variety of options to sweeten foods without sugar, but those foods often don’t taste right. Catalina Crunch’s honey-nut-flavored cereal bursts with sweetness thanks to the plant extract stevia. But instead of the complex flavor of honey, the cereal has a sweetness that lacks depth and that has a lingering metallic aftertaste.
Artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose also have undesirable bitter or metallic flavors, and they don’t appear to be a useful long-term solution to many of the health problems associated with eating lots of added sugar, according to the World Health Organization.
Other categories of ultraprocessed foods face their own flavor challenges. For example, the pea protein used in many plant-based replacements for meat can impart a beany flavor. So start-ups are developing ingredients to cover these unwelcome off notes.
MycoTechnology has developed a mushroom-derived ingredient that can mitigate bitter, sour, or astringent flavors. The firm says the ingredient makes it easier for food companies to achieve the taste they’re looking for without relying on salt, fat, or synthetic additives. Macalat is already using the ingredient to reduce the bitterness of its sugar-free chocolate.
“When you get a good-tasting product, you don’t realize how many ingredients have been added to it to mask off notes,” says Ranjan Patnaik, the chief technology officer and interim CEO of MycoTechnology.
Added sugar is only one of the foes that major packaged food companies are confronting. Earlier this year, Kraft Heinz requested proposals from researchers working on technologies to reduce the amount of sodium in food. And PepsiCo has committed to limiting the content of saturated fats, which have been linked to heart disease.
The start-up Shiru is developing a product that can replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats, like sunflower oil or olive oil. CEO Jasmin Hume says Shiru uses a potato protein to create a scaffold that encapsulates unsaturated liquid fats and forces them to behave more like solid saturated fats.
This encapsulation could keep a plant-based burger’s oils from leaking during cooking and thus help the product more closely mimic the juiciness of beef. Shiru’s protein scaffold can also stabilize flavor-carrying fats in products that are mostly liquid, such as sauces or dressings. “That can be leveraged to create new flavor systems,” Hume says. “With a small amount of oil, you can actually deliver the flavors in a different way.”
Previous attempts to reduce fat in packaged foods haven’t gone well. When fat became a nutritional bogeyman in the 1990s, both Frito-Lay and Kellogg swapped out the fats in some of their potato chips for olestra, a molecule that tastes like fat but doesn’t add any calories to food. Some studies found that olestra might cause diarrhea and that it interferes with the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins. The companies discontinued the products.
Hume argues that the next generation of food technologies will be different. Shiru and MycoTechnology are using natural molecules that people already consume, reducing concerns about unforeseen health effects. She adds that nutritionists today have a clearer picture of which nutrients are connected to bad health outcomes. “We know the effect that sugars have. We know the effect that saturated fat can have on our arterial systems,” she says.
Removing sugar and fat from processed foods leaves a void in the formulation, and many companies want to fill it with yet-to-be demonized nutrients like protein and fiber.
At a facility in the Netherlands, the Protein Brewery grows the rootlike mycelium fiber of mushrooms in large bioreactors, dries them, and mills them into a protein-rich powder that can be used to replace flour in baked goods. BetterBrand is already using the product in a gluten-free bagel. The Protein Brewery has also created prototypes of tortilla and pita chips and is talking with several companies that are hoping to use the powder in pasta.
Researchers are still investigating mechanisms that cause the negative health effects linked to ultraprocessed foods. Rob Shewfelt, a retired University of Georgia food researcher, is skeptical that processing is the biggest culprit, and he suspects that nutrients play a big role. He says studies reporting harms to health rarely separate foods with tons of salt, sugar, and saturated fats from those like breakfast cereals that are high in fiber.
But Anthony Fardet, a researcher at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, says the problem with ultraprocessed food goes beyond nutrients. He argues that industrial processing breaks apart the matrix of nutrients in whole foods. Among other changes, he says, this allows the sugar in ultraprocessed foods to reach the bloodstream too quickly.
“There are no bad and good nutrients,” he says. “The metabolic and physiological effect of the nutrient depends on the quality of the food matrix.”
He warns that technology is not a panacea and that piecing together isolated nutrients will never create products that are as healthy as whole foods. According to Fardet, the real solution is creating a food system in which nutritious, whole foods are readily available for everyone.
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