(Anti)nutrients, or What Is Fit To Eat?
In my quest for additive-free additives for the NOT-winkie, over the past week of intensive study I’ve found myself wading through a mire of patents and scientific reports on “functional” extracts from seed, grains, and dairy.
“So what?”, one might think. Well, here’s what: I soon discerned the reductionist-reconstructionist mindset of the food-processing industry: take some agricultural by-product left over from pressing or milling, and isolate a set of nutrients—proteins, gums, starches etc.—therefrom, stripping away bothersome components along the way. Quite frequently the goal is to produce some odorless, tasteless white powder that can be slipped into the food stream to great potential profit—while displacing recognizable food that must be eliminated to keep down costs.
One recent example, US7989017, deals with isolating protein from leftover canola seed—aka low-erucic acid oilseed rape—after the oil’s been pressed or solvent-extracted. As with dairy whey, canola pressing cake, a by-product formerly known as landfill, river effluent, or hog-feed, is being recycled as food. Not as bad as Soylent Green, maybe, but there are huge financial incentives to manage the canola oil industry waste stream.
A poser: How likely is it that the whole “Reduce-Reuse-Recycle-Rethink” mantra of urban Greenies and Effetes is just a Capitalist-Agroindustrial softening-up artifice to persuade you and me to eat garbage? Chew on that one for a while... but I digress.
Chlorogenates and Phytates: Poisons or Panaceas?
I like the sunflower, Helianthus annuus, esthetically for its blossoms, and nutritionally as a seed-food. For the NOT-winkie, there is potential here as a combined source of protein, lecithin (emulsifier mixing aid), tocopherols (vitamin E), and dietary fiber.
Thing is, academia and the agro-food industry have a problem with stuff also found in sunflower: chlorogenates and phytates. As with canola, there is huge potential profit in further squeezing sunflower kernels for all they’re worth, but these bothersome molecules discolor proteins (chlorogenic: chloro-color, and gennan-produce; scientists are so clever with their pseudo-Greek) and interfere with the extraction of protein.
Chlorogenates, in particular Chlorogenic acid (CA) is present in many plant foods, with high levels in coffee, tea, sunflower kernels, blueberries, and coriander aka cilantro. CA has been fingered as an allergen and laxative (found in the skin of prunes), and binds with dietary calcium, magnesium, zinc, and iron, reducing these nutrients’ availability. Must be bad, right? Not so fast...
CA, while having an antinutrient aspect, seems to improve one’s blood-sugar glycemic/insulin response, has a mildly-psychostimulatory effect similar to caffeine, increases one’s sense of well-being, and moderates blood pressure. CA is actually sold as a “fat burning” dietary supplement. So... maybe not so bad.
Phytates, notably Phytic acid (PA) is another mixed bag. PA too is found in most grains and seeds, and as antinutrient also chelates or binds with calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc, and interferes with uptake of protein, fats, and the B-vitamin niacin, hypothetically setting one up for a deficiency in these essential nutrients. Bad thing, eh? Well, it seems PA’s sword swings both ways.
PA as a chelator also reduces kidney stone formation and heavy metal toxicity. Alzheimer’s disease, which has an etiological factor of aluminum and other heavy-metal overload, may benefit from PA therapy. It is also has antioxidant properties, and may be useful against cancer due to its cancer-cell interference and immune-stimulatory properties. It also has found therapeutic use against diabetes, atherosclerosis, and coronary heart disease.
Chlorogenates and Phytates are mentioned here in a NOT-winkies context because, unlike the aforementioned agriculture-waste salvage industry, Browne Crowe Bakes will make no strenuous effort to remove them from ingredients going into the mixing bowl.
Monet’s Yellow Bane
A dirty little secret of the wheat, sunflower, and tobacco agroindustries is that these plants are adept in sucking up Cadmium from certain salty or clay-rich soils. Due to its wide use in industry, environmental contamination is pervasive and occasionally severe. This is a toxic, nasty little element that competes with zinc, selenium, copper and other minerals in the body.
There are few biochemical processes in the body that cadmium does not fvck up, and its effects tend to build with age and exposure. French Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) liked to use cadmium yellow paint, but it finally killed him after years of slow, painful degeneration.
There’s a bit of a rush on to develop wheat and sunflower cultivars that show less cadmium uptake (gee, thanks!), and an industry-wide trend to kick to the curb those farmers who may have to grow on cadmium-rich soils rather than abandon the farm.
In the meanwhile, and on the bright side, the body knows how to rid itself of cadmium, but it needs other nutrients to help: adequate calcium, manganese, selenium, zinc, copper, and vitamins C, D and E in the diet helps one’s body displace, bind, and excrete cadmium. Happily, sunflower kernels also contain many of these nutrients as a kind of build-in antidote; nice.
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It has been a flurry of activity of late, gathering resources and performing preliminary trials (monkeying around) in the Top Secret R&D Lab of Browne Crowe Bakes.
I have some encouraging protein-lipid extracts of sunflower and preparations of resistant starch ready to try, and the other day I received my Norpro 3964 Cream Canoe set for upcoming baking trials.
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