Food, come on food - personalized

The food that is developed today is planned not only in the details of preparing its ingredients and cooking it in the kitchen or processing it in the food factory, but today takes into account the digestive processes that allow it to promote the health of the consumer and prevent diseases. This "reverse engineering" makes it possible to analyze which additives should be added to food and how to process these foods to increase public health. Impressions from the conference "Food Engineering in the 21st Century" held at the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering on the occasion of the arrival of Prof. Zaki Barak

The article was first published in the Technion magazine

Much water has passed even in Kishon since Prof. Zaki Barak advised the governments on how to improve the nutrition of the citizens of their countries. In Israel, he began his journey by improving the extraction capacity of the orange concentrate in order to save on expensive means of transport to markets abroad and since then he has assisted and supported in various ways, including through UNIDO, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, in the improvement and development of industrial processes in many third world countries and developing countries.

All of this could be learned from the words of the many congratulators at a symposium on food engineering in the 21st century, innovative approaches and technologies to promote health, in honor of Prof. Zaki Barak upon his arrival at Gevorov that was held in the faculty building at the end of April.

Prof. Barak designed food lines for the Israeli and international market. Later became an expert in processing citrus fruits and food technologies. But everyone who eats today who saved plants from soybeans owes it to Prof. Barak, who, funded by the USDA, researched how meat products can be replaced with better proteins from soybeans and cotton.

He played an important role in educating many generations of food engineers who are responsible for bringing the Israeli food industry to where it is today.

For these activities he received several lifetime achievement awards from the industry and international organizations.
But not only the past, but rather the future was the topic of the symposium. In the days when decoding a person's DNA costs about a hundred dollars, the sky is the limit, when it will be possible to design not only medicines to suit a particular person, but also the food that suits them. But even until we reach this moment, the food industry has something to improve in order to provide the population with healthy food.

Prof. Ben Zion Levy, Dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering opened the conference and introduced the faculty and Prof. Barak's life stories in the last 60 years, since he was associated with the Technion.
The guest lecture from abroad, Prof. Eric Windhav, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich, Switzerland) dealt with "intelligent functional processing for personalized food based on a reverse engineering approach to the digestive processes."

Prof. Windhav explained that the approach today in food engineering and the food industry is that the responsibility of the engineers goes beyond the scope of the factory and the responsibility for the production processes and reaches all the way to the consumer and the responsibility to ensure that the food is not only accessible and safe but also effective in promoting health and preventing disease. In light of this paradigm shift, a reverse engineering approach is now being adopted. Initially, they try to understand what the food product will do in the body, from this understanding they try to engineer the food so that it does what is expected of it (for example, developing an industrial process to enrich rice with iron supplements and vitamin A to deal with deficiencies in these substances in children). Prof. Windhav explained how the industry faces a variety of scientific and technological challenges in order to meet the preferences and needs of different people through the engineering of food processing processes for different structures, performances, textures and properties. He described an experiment he conducted in Morocco in which 190 children who were deficient in iron and/or vitamin A were fed enriched rice. Some of them were fed with normal rice and some with the enriched rice, and in those who ate the enriched rice, a significant improvement was recorded in the levels of iron and vitamin A in the body.

Prof. Sam Sagi, from the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and the Environment at the Hebrew University spoke about opportunities, challenges and paradigm changes towards the future from a personal perspective. In his opinion, one of the biggest challenges in the world of food is the aging of the population and the increase in the population that will reach 9 billion people within 40 years, with 16% of them being 65 or older. A second challenge is the explosion of information, especially unstructured information such as posts on social networks that may spread unfounded and misleading information and sow confusion in the public. The third challenge is personalization. Today, successes in the field of medicine can be identified in personalized medicines that can help in creating personalized food and adequate consideration of the consumer's preferences and perceptions based on an advanced understanding of brain processes, decision-making mechanisms and emotions.

"All these things do not go unnoticed by the people of the food industry. Nestlé, for example, opened a health department in which it invests 500 million dollars to develop food products that will also be used as drugs in preventive medicine. The challenges are the need to save water, agricultural land and energy and improve food security in the face of hunger on the one hand and obesity on the other, as well as to show, as an industry, social responsibility." Prof. Sagi says.

The representative of the industry, Dr. Shaul Midev, former Chief Scientist of the Asam Group addressed these challenges and spoke about transferring nutrition and health to the consumer - challenges and strategies in the industry. Midev elaborated on the trend of creating food with reduced salt, reduced sugar, and various practical strategies for making the necessary changes. For example, he described how one can gradually reduce the amount of salt in the diet or change the distribution of salt on chips, so that on the other hand we can enjoy its salty taste and the manufacturer will reduce the amount of salt in the product by leaving a high concentration of salt on the surface of the chips and reducing levels The salt inside the chips. According to him, we have to take responsibility for the fact that we are our own engine. What we do will also come back to us. This responsible approach is evident both in research and in industry that invest efforts to make food healthier, especially when people understand and are willing to pay more for healthy food.

Dr. Uri Lazmes, who also chaired the seminar, gave the closing lecture of the seminar in place of Prof. Jochen Weiss (University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany) who was unable to attend and discussed the utilization of natural reactions and interactions to transmit health in food. "One of the approaches to changing food to make it healthier is to try to harness the natural processes in food and cooking - understand how they work and harness them to our needs. An example of this is electrostatic forces of attraction between food ingredients that can enable the creation of nanoparticles that will improve their digestibility, or create emulsions, for example salad dressings, that have several envelopes around the fat droplets and thereby affect not only their stability on the shelf but also their digestion processes and increase or slow down digestion of fat along the digestive tract. Dr. Lazmes described systems that operate in the Technion laboratories and which simulate the digestion processes inside the body to allow both industry and researchers to test new foods, and new formulas in a fast, efficient and correct way compared to the existing methods.

Prof. Zaki Barak to all the organizers and participants and concluded: "Food in the 21st century will become more individual, more tailored, more health promoting, but I can seriously tell you that it will also be more expensive. The cost of living, the cost of food to feed a family is becoming a big concern for fathers and mothers. After several years of prosperity, we have a challenge. I know the problem is not technology but technology can help and we need to remember that in everything we do in industry or universities."