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Engineering Food at the Molecular Level
Krishna Dagli writes to mention a New York Times article about the possibility of manipulating food at a molecular level. Though some of the initial suggestions are a little pointless (lower-fat ice cream, harder-to-melt M&Ms), weighter goals could eventually be achieved here as well. From the article: "Given the uncertainty about the risks of consuming new nano products, many analysts expect near-term investment to focus on novel food processing and packaging technology. That is the niche targeted by Sunny Oh, whose start-up company, OilFresh, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is marketing a novel device to keep frying oil fresh. OilFresh grinds zeolite, a mineral, into tiny beads averaging 20 nanometers across and coats them with an undisclosed material. Packed into a shelf inside the fryer, the beads interfere with chemical processes that break down the oil or form hydrocarbon clusters, Mr. Oh says. As a result, restaurants can use oil longer and transfer heat to food at lower temperatures, although they still need traditional filters to remove food waste from the oil. Mr. Oh said OilFresh will move beyond restaurants into food processing by the end of the month, when it delivers a 1,000-ton version of the device to a 'midsized potato chip company' that he said did not want to be identified. "
I'll take my food from the field any day over from the factory, thank you very much.
I'm all for engineering but when it comes to what I eat I'm very oldfashioned. No reconstituted, GM, reprocessed anything.
MP3 Search Engine
Call me when they can make cough syrup taste good. Then Ill be impressed.
Oh, and M&M's are designed to melt at just above room temp. That way they "Melt in your mouth, not in your hands." There is no need for nano-tech to fix them.
However, the post processing this weekend has left much cleaning up.
Remember folks, when your family is poorly don't let them drink Rasberry milkshake.
Whilst the coloring may help to identify the last bits needing cleaning you will not be able to remove it from your memory.
liqbase
Is it just me, or does "Sunny Oh" sound like it should be a brand name of fried snack food?
when interfering with natural food processes like this. Are you doing mankind a favour or creating a stream of cancer patients 20 years down the line.
Artificial preservatives and flavourings were the bees knees apprently when they hit the shelves first until it turned out many were carcinogens or just really not what you body wanted to be accumulating. Now look at the consumer demand for organically grown and prepared food.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Can someone please engineer hangover proof Alcohol?
Why does this remind me of the group trying to geneticly alter pigs so bacon isn't bad for us anymore?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
about cooking items coated "with an undisclosed material"?
I'll take my potato chips without undisclosed materials, thank you very much.
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
I'm not sure you can really call deep fat frying a natural food process, to be honest.
May cause Anal Leakage. WTF?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Essentially (yes, I did not RTFA) we are talking about injecting nano-particles into the frying oil to make it last longer?
Even though some nano-materials could be highly dangerous to human health? In other words, we may end up with highly dangerous cancer-causing products used in kitchens? To fry greasy stuff that we know are bad for our health anyway? Talk about a double whammy: if your heart attack does not kill you, cancer from nano-particles will. And do you want fries with that?
Then again, this is business as usual in the USA, so I guess it will probably be used soon.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Wouldn't it be better to grow food instead of engineer food? Moore's Law doesn't have to apply to everything.
(can't really think how to phrase this so the following is a little garbled. sorry)
So there's people who don't eat meat, people who don't eat dairy products, and people who only eat organic.
Vegetarians are generally a lot stricter than organic-eaters, mainly because their choice is based on a moral judgement about things other than themselves, whereas people who eat organic food tend to have their main motivation as "I don't want to eat crap". But with 'advances' such as this, I think there should be a new and widely recognised classification of dietary requirement that prevents the use of these types of technology, not in a 'personal preference' way such as that of those who eat organic food, but in a much more fundamental way, such as that of vegetarians.
As above, Bleh.
"But troubling laboratory tests suggest some nanoscale particles may pose novel health risks by, for instance, slipping easily past barriers to the brain that keep larger particles out"
Great, people will stop having clogged arteries from fat and cholesterol, but instead have arteries suddenly clogged from zeolite clusters, or problems from tiny zeolite particles parking themselves in brain tissue.
We're going to have to look for food and restaurants that advertise:
No MSG...
No Zeolite...
No OilFresh...
No Olestra...
A 1,000 ton device for a midsized potato chip company?
I wonder how many potato chips will that process per day? How much "undisclosed material" will they need to make that monster?
Does anyone remember Olean? The oil that is indigetable by humans but feels, tastes and fries like real oil. What happened to it? All I remember is it used to cause "anal leakage" or something gross.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
From what I can tell zeolite is an approved food additive. But does it become something that's been entirely untested once you grind it up into nano-particles, and then coat it with some other undisclosed substance (presumably another food safe additive)?
Moon dust was a big problem huge problem for Apollo astronauts as it got past seals. I've heard that it's supposed to consist at least partially of nano-particles. The question is, do ordinary substances behave a lot differently when we grind them up into nano-particles?
My guess it that the FDA rules don't mention particle size when specifying food additives, so something like this could fly under the radar until someone thinks that maybe nano food additives might be a little different.
AccountKiller
The first attempt at engineered food was called Scrapple. Production of this bioterror caused a chain-reaction explosion that resulted in the creation of Philadelphia. Scientists estimate it might take 3.7 million years before the area becomes habitable again.
This article made me think back to this...Store Wars
Healthy veggies that taste better than chocolate cake.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
How can anyone trust the FDA to actually have the consumers, and not the multi-billion dollar food conglomerates interests in mind?
This is the same federal agency that has let the food industry poison us for decades through the use of trans-fats, which have been shown to cause obesity, cancer, and many more health problems. The only reason that they use trans-fats is that it increases the shelf life of foods, which saves the big food companies a few cents on refrigeration and storage costs.
So the food industry would rather save a few cents per package, and doesn't care about poisoning the average american citizen. The FDA has been complicit in this, and has let them get away with it for decades, only in the last couple years have they actually required food companies to even list the amount of trans-fats included in food items. This is for a substance that the FDA has determined there is no safe amount.
No thanks. I don't trust the FDA to protect me from foods that will be small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. I foresee a whole new generation of unhealthy americans that will be dying from strange diseases, none the wiser that it's their poisoned food supply causing it.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Dang, beaten to it again. I was planning to engineer my food at a molecular level this evening my heating it until the proteins became denatured and the carbohydrates broke down from long chain sugars into simpler ones. Now I'll just have to eat it raw again or face a DMCA takedown...
...is screwed for awhile if this story makes the mainstream media. If we don't know which chip company is using it, we just have to avoid them all. It's a win-win for public health.
if we can assemble molecules to this degree now- howabout ice 9? the amazing substance that was never fully thought out enough by it's author.
ice 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-9 among other interesting tidbits, should become a solid WITHOUT increasing in volume, this means for suspended animation- the cells don't burst.
is there no way to stack water molecules, so they stack neatly and tightly?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I'll take my food from the field any day over from the factory, thank you very much. I'm all for engineering but when it comes to what I eat I'm very oldfashioned. No reconstituted, GM, reprocessed anything.
Me, too, but watch for those which are still raised in fields but have been bred for size and appearance. I've had enough of these damn foods which taste like cardboard. It isn't worth $3.00 for a basket of huge, red strawberries which don't have half the flavour of the little tiny ones which grow wild.
Also make sure nobody shits in your water source. This is where all this e. coli is coming from near San Juan Batista and Salinas. Evidently someone couldn't hold it to the porta-john.
I got into organic gardening years ago when I lived in Michigan. I joined a usenet group of UK gardeners, which had members from Michigan State University and Ohio State University Agriculture Extentions. Just spending the winter reading up on how simple it is, if you're smart enough, to scent mask your plants with flowers, how to properly till soil and not compact it with big clumsy feet, etc. I had a hugely successful 17' x 39' plot that year and most of my food for late spring and summer came from it including some astounding roma tomatoes.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
some of the initial suggestions are a little pointless (lower-fat ice cream, harder-to-melt M&Ms)
So healthier and cleaner (as in the food is not adversely affected by temperature extremes) food is pointless? What color is the sky on that planet you apparently live on? What are the coordinates, so we can point our telescopes your way and study your planet? Tell us about the life there -- we want to know how it evolved.
i am a soviet space shuttle
And putting zeolite into oil doesnt seem to have anything to do with the title, unless you know somewhere where oil is marketed as "food".
And the article isnt clear, but what may be going on isnt chemical manipulation at all, but just simple mechanical filtering.
Otherwise okay.
That means we will be eating nano-particles of zeolite coated with an "undisclosed" material in our food and excreting what we don't absorb into our bodies* into the environment.
* and if it stops hydrocarbon reactions in oil, what is it going to do inside our bodies?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is revisionist bunk. The lead towards hydrogenated vegetable oils was done by the health nannies. The CSPI had campaigns against beef tallow and butter and saturated oils. They had press conferences against the coconut oils used in movie popcorn. They highlighted the dangers of the peanut oil in Chinese takeout and they hammered the few corporate hold-outs that refused to change. In was only during the early 90's that they reversed course given all the research. The transfat problem is NOT a problem of corporate greed, it was a CSPI problem. Now all these supposedly bad oils like coconut, peanut, and beef tallow are back in fashion or even considered heart healthy, and the health nannies have the gall to blame the EEEVIL corporations when it was THEIR good intentions that caused the shift to transfat hell! You just may be too young to remember the 80's.
Mr. Oh said OilFresh will move beyond restaurants into food processing by the end of the month, when it delivers a 1,000-ton version of the device to a 'midsized potato chip company' that he said did not want to be identified. "
Well, there's a backhanded endorsement if ever I read one. What happened to that Olestra stuff? Safe, right? Oh, it gave people the trots and maybe was accused of other maladies. If you're Frito Lay, you're going to move cautiously on this one. Eh?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Zeolite" refers to a class of minerals, not a particular mineral. They are aluminosilicate molecular sieves, and they are naturally formed from volcanic ash (a.k.a. "nanorock"). If you've ever taken a chemistry class, you've probably seen these little zeolite beads that are used to keep solvents dry (the pores suck up any free water).
I'm guessing the company is using a special type of zeolite that selectively adsorbs free fatty acids, which are the species in fry oil that go rancid. Nothing too special, but enough to make everyone freak out about "dangerous nanoparticles."
The question is, do ordinary substances behave a lot differently when we grind them up into nano-particles?
No, the question is "Do zeolites have toxic effects when ground up very finely and consumed with french fries?" Based on the fact that they come from volcanic ash, and have no heavy metals or organic molecules in them, I'd venture "no." Keep in mind breathing volcanic ash is not good for your lungs; the dry ash turns into cement when in contact with water. But certain substances do have radically different properties on the nano-scale, such as quantum confinement of electrons. Also, any zeolites consumed would be incidental--if these are anything like any other zeolites I've seen, they'd remain in the fry oil, and no one would ever eat them.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Can you imagine it? You could make food that no one else can eat without being violently sick.
That'd stop people from pinching my French Fries!
Summation 2
Everything on that page is supported by heavy referencing at the bottom. Or if you really want to get scared about the modern diet, check out The Oiling of America.
In short, if you have to invent a new technology to produce it, it's probably not "food".
Nope, no sig
Sounds scarily like the engineered food described in Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman in which the character Famine develops food with specially woven and capped protein chains (approx. sic) with no nutritional value that allows the consumer to eat as much as they want and still look good while at the same time dying of malnutrition.
IIRC (and no, I didnt RTFM so this might have been mentioned there), the high-temp M&Ms have been around since the first gulf war (the one H. W. Bush presided over), and were designed specifically so that they could be sent to the troops there without melting. At least, Im pretty sure I remember some new article or TV special report that mentioned that...
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
It's not like food has been statically unchanged over the last several thousand years, or even several hundred years. We've been using selective breeding techniques ever since we started agriculture. Do you think that chicken you're eating is like the original un-domesticated version that came from the wild? Is the corn, wheat, tomatoes, etc the same as it was 2000 years ago, or even 200 years ago?
Rejecting GM, processed, or whatever food with broad strokes doesn't make any sense. We've been changing our food for a long long time, so you really shouldn't be eating anything that society (modern or non-modern) produces at all. If you want "purity before human intervention" you should go back to the hunter-gatherer society, just be carefull not to gather anything that's reproduced with human-interferred stuff.
That's not to say that you shouldn't be concerned with food additives, GM foods, etc. It's just a matter of making sure it's all safe rather than rejecting it all out of hand.
AccountKiller
Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.
After having her wisdom teeth out, my wife was restricted to soft foods only for a couple of days. She was starving until I convinced her that it wasn't disgusting to drink a shot of olive oil. There are regions in Italy where it is regularly consumed straight, and an ounce of fat is very good at satisfying hunger.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
If you could use frying oil for longer, it means you'd buy less overall. You could then take the excess of processed oils and use them for fuel. That's a win right there, particularly for agribusiness.
It was being blown out of something, all right, but it wasn't "proportion".
-- or --
If you think anal leakage isn't that big a deal, you probably aren't that concerned with your health to begin with.
Nope, no sig
> unless you know somewhere where oil is marketed as "food".
Uh, do you know anyplace where it isn't? Have you perfected a frying process that leaves no oil? Must be some pretty damn dry chips you got there.
I predict that by 2025, the United States will have people who are so overweight, that the current obesity epidemic will look like an Ana convention of twig girls. Add to that the fact that the Segway having failed to really do much of anything will be moving into the realm of "mobility augmentation" and people who can no longer carry their weight on their own legs but still want to smash four buckets of KFC into their gobs will opt for having those useless appendages removed and replaced with the Segway 5000 mobility enhancment. This will be covered by both health and auto insurance since the size of the average American will be approaching that of a mid-sized four door sedan. And why do I predict this? Because people have no control over their own drives and attempt to justify the results of poor diets and lack of activity rather than make some intially difficult but highly beneficial changes. I am also very certain that these molecularly engineered foods will NOT be good for you. Not because there's a problem with the technology, but because there's a problem with the businesses behind them.
As we all know, our well being takes a really far, wayyyy at the back of the bus, back seat to their profitability. So if there is some aspect of molecular food engineering that will vastly increase profits for them, but might have negative consequences for say 10% of the population... they will do it. Conversely, if there is something that could be done with molecular food engineering that would not only make the food taste good, but is also beneficial to us, however costs them something (even in the short term), it's not going to be a priority, and quite possibly may never be done at all. So the issue isn't that I think the technology is necessarily bad. It's how it will be used that I fear. Plenty of lies have been foisted on us about various food additives being safe (not taking small percentages of the population who they aren't safe for, into account) when they really aren't. And a lot of people WANT to believe because it gives them justification for eating and drinking things that are bad for them. So they bury their heads in the sand and don't accept that their medical problems are very likely related to what they eat and drink. They put their pleasure ahead of their health. To bad moves that sandwich the dietary issue and will likely NEVER be addressed because the victims don't want to make sacrifices and the perpetrators don't want to make sacrifices. Sad indeed.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This is the same federal agency that has let the food industry poison us for decades
Too dumb to read a food label? All the constituents are clearly labeled.
So the food industry would rather save a few cents per package, and doesn't care about poisoning the average american citizen. The FDA has been complicit in this, and has let them get away with it for decades, only in the last couple years have they actually required food companies to even list the amount of trans-fats included in food items. This is for a substance that the FDA has determined there is no safe amount.
Yes. Determined in 2002. How were they supposed to enforce a ban / labeling on a substance unknown to be dangerous until studies were concluded in 2002?
No thanks. I don't trust the FDA to protect me
Again... are you too dumb to protect yourself? Can't read a label? Can't get outside the groupthink? I feel sorry for you.
What's really happening is that Big Oil is secretly funding this research to _reduce_ the amount of waste oil available for those god damned hippies to turn into biodiesel. Then they'll have to go back to regular dead-dino versions and get off all those leftist network shows and we won't have to listen to some asshole with a scruffy beard and a 20 year old clunker truck saying "And my exhaust smells like tortilla chips!"
if you can build food at the molecular level- you can build ICE at the molecular level- making my post NOT off topic......
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Just because something is described as "nanoparticle", it doesn't mean everything is created equal.
E.g., if it then disolves in water instead of staying a particle, the whole thing about it originally being a nano-particle doesn't mean jack squat by the time it's dissolved mollecules in your bloodstream. You could eat something containing, say, sugar nano-particles and it wouldn't do any more harm than the same quantity of sugar in any other form.
E.g., there are a ton of things already that do involve particle-sized bits of a substance in another substance it doesn't dissolve in. Mayo, for example. Emulsions are like that. The thing about mayo is that (A) we're talking _liquid_ particles, so nothing that would go poke a hole through your brain with its sharp edges, and (B) substances which are processed by your body long before that anyway. Making the droplets nanometre sized instead of micron sized wouldn't even start to make any difference. Sure, you might get a liver or cholesterol problem out of it, just like out of the same quantity of normal mayo, but none of it would be because of scary nano-particles.
Basically I wish both sides would just let go of the buzzword and get back to thinking critically.
On one hand you have the media and VCs, for which even shit sounds cool and high-tech if it even mentions nano-tech. Never mind that just grinding something into nanometre-sized dust particles is _not_ what nano-tech was supposed to mean.
And on the other hand you have the luddites for which the mere mention of nano-tech sounds like the Antichrist, and _must_ have the same effects as moon dust. Because, you know, a nanometre-sized drop of oil _must_ have the same effects on the body as a nanometre-sized piece of hard stone. It's all "nano" stuff, so it must all be the same, right? Well, wrong.
Basically let's just get back to thinking critically about it, and having some more actual information about it, instead of assuming that these guys' additives _must_ be either the second coming of Christ or the final sign of the Apocalypse, just because it has the magic word "nano" in there. Whatever it is, it'll get fed by the spoonful to lab mice, it'll get radioactively tagged, etc, and then they'll dissect those mice and see where that stuff ended and what happened to every single organ in those mice. If anyone finds a bunch of that in their brains, there'll be plenty of people screaming bloody murder, so you know to stay away from it. There'll be studies, counter-studies, astro-turfing, conspiracy theories and hentai fanfic about it. And then you can at least choose which you believe based on some more detailed claims than just its being "nano". There, it wasn't so hard, was it?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Cream of Wheat was bad enough, now they want us to eat grey goo?
We currently have a pretty good understanding of a lot of the processes in the human body, but we have a very poor ability to understand the chain of events that happens when foreign and unnatural molecules are introduced into the body. I mean, we do for certain things. We know how a lot of drugs work and we know how a lot of other things work, but many of these things take many years to understand and even then, stuff slips by and we end up killing people because of unforseen chains of events that these molecules can cause.
I could probably list a thousand things that we've been adding to food over the years that, on the surface, seemed to be great, but after years of consumption ended up causing cancer or some other problem.
Our understanding of human physiology needs to advance a great deal before we start screwing with our food supply any more than we already have. In the U.S., we started adding high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) to food products in the 70s and since then, diabetes and obesity have spiraled out of control. Back in the 50s and 60s, coke was sold in 8 oz bottles. Now 16 oz bottles are the norm, not to mention the supersized 32 and 64 oz behemoths a lot of people drink on a daily basis. It would be bad enough if it was just plain table sugar, but HFCS is not natural and I strongly suspect it's far worse for our bodies than we've been led to believe.
Europeans don't smoke more than Americans, yet the incidences of most forms of cancer, including lung cancer are lower than that of Americans. Most Americans are of European stock, so it's not a genetic issue and frankly, I don't even think exercise is the big issue. The big issue is the crap we eat in this country. It's killing us because none of it is natural. The last thing we need is for them to make our food any less natural.
It seems the more that humans mess with food, the worse we make it. I remember when my mother starting using margarine because it was better for us than that bad butter. Guess what, the hydrogenated stuff is now apparently much worse than saturated fats. I'm going back to the basics. The less humans touch it, the better it probably is for us. I've even taken to picking up more organic stuff at the grocery store, not that I'm an environmental nut or anything .... just seems the more we make things easier for ourselves like pre-packaged salads or spinach, the more things seem to go wrong.
WTF is up with tinkering with our food supply? Since we've added all of this non-natural crap to our food supply, obesity rates have surged. High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Trans-Fats, MSG, "natural" & artificial flavorings, Olestra, etc. have just fattened us up and made us unhealthy. I recommend everyone read Fast Food Nation for insights into the foods that most of us eat. I hardly ever consume the processed products found in a common supermarket, but instead shop at Farmers' Market and Whole Foods.
/. that pretty much means I've altogether stopped going out to restaurants.) But when I do, I try to order what I think is the most natural, least-processed foods on the menu. It's usually blacked / steamed fish with steamed vegetables. I stay away from all fried foods.
Food manufacturing is a multi-billion dollar industry. The goal is not to create healthy, albeit more expensive foods. The goal is profit. Create a new "food" and price it accordingly so as to maximize profits. If it causes obesity, so what? Let the health care systems pick up the bill. Why not focus on how to more efficiently grow organic, free-range, and all-natural foods? Simple - there's more $$$ in mass-producing artificial crap.
I, for one, have really stopped going out to restaurants, other than for dates with the ladies. (Since this is
Many of the health problems people face today are only serious concerns later in life, ie. after people are done procreating.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Organic food is mostly a scam. It's really a way to crank up the price. The farming cost differential for "organic" crops is small, but the retail price differential is large.
You've been had by Whole Foods.
Whole Foods is amusing. They have a huge booze section. Looks like a liquor store that also carries food.
The problem with restaurants seems to be pasta. There's been this huge move towards Italian restaurants, where, by running generic carbohydrates through an extruder, they can produce something for which they can charge serious money. French cuisine takes real work in the kitchen, and competent chefs. Italian restaurants can be run by minimum-wage labor.
And what happens when you digest some of those beads? They prevent your liver from breaking down the oil?
"Do no harm" is the Hippocratic oath (at least in theory), and it's here that some modern MDs fail (but that's another discussion). I'd like to weigh in on the side of staying closer to natural sources, and only accepting human-modified alternatives if and when tests conclusively prove there are no other unforseen effects. This is a tough one as the food and medical powers that be have flip-flopped on products like Margarine (and other hydrogenated fats), Sacharine/NutraSweet (and other artificial sweeteners), Food colorings/preservatives, and even wholesome products like eggs (yes they contain cholesterol, but miniscule compared with the main culprit - body-manufactured LDL from saturated fats). At what point do we assume any product is safe based on testing, and can we trust a particular test only to find out years later that we've been doing harm to ourselves over time? Just like software, I say avoid any Version 1.0!
I think the parent poster brings up a good point here, in that many of the comments on this article so far that have been in opposition to GM foods have failed to cite any specific examples. If you're going to talk about some mysterious bad voodoo that GM foods have perpetrated on the unsuspecting populace, at least take the 5 minutes required to google it and provide some citations. Just saying "oh well, you know, GM foods are pretty bad and can do some nasty stuff" isn't going to convince anyone or make for a constructive debate.
That fresh feeling you get on a clear, crisp spring morning as you run through a field of wildflowers.
No, wait, that's douching.
K, I have to de-bullshit this claim.
We went over this in class last week or so, my prof does extensive work in the food processing industry and did work on fryers.
Frying is done with oil. (fatty acids and long chain hydrocarbons)
Fryers go to hot temperatures.
The food they fry has water.
The food is organic. (hydrocarbons + esters + protiens + more fatty acids)
So! We end up with:
1. Thermal degredation! Can't stop this! It's a function of N*cycles of heating!
2. Water hydates the oils! Guess what, cannot stop this either! H2O+fatty acids = hydrogination at high temps.
3. Burning pieces of food enter the oil, plus anything oil soluble will enter the oil! The burning food discolours the oil (going from golden colours to brackish brown), it's just carbon though. The other solutes are the difficult problem, whatever was in your frying food is now in the oil!
4. Oxidation nothing anyone can do will stop this, because oxygen usually has free access to the surface of fryers, and therefore oil. Industry can replace O2 with N2 or another noble gas, but it costs money.
Overall the best these "nanoparticles" could be, (ps don't even listen words like nanoparticle or nanoanything in an obvious press release) is a small sphere, coated in a semipermeable membrane. There is going to be no pressure gradient, no electrical gradient, no difference of velocity/momentum, leaving only a chemical gradient, propelled by thermal energy, which means the efficiency of this additive/process is highly limited. In an industrial setting where pressure can be supplied it would work much better.
Now for the second half of my post.
HOW DOES something which is ISOLATED from the rest of the system affect it? These spheres do not directly affect the bonding of fatty acids as they ARE PACKED INTO an AREA and placed into the oil, unless they contain an enzyme, or some solvent...(zeolite can be altered to an enzyme/acid or just a simple ion exchange column).
I say isolated because these particles cannot be free floating in the oil, because it would then attach to the food, which would not be allowed. (and again if the particles are so small (50 nanometers, a membrane of smaller porosity would be needed to hold the beads back, further decreasing the efficiency of the filtration)
PS this new method is subject to all the same degredations as was mentioned by the original oil.
I wonder how much oil it saves in term of mass flux, or how much healthier it makes the oil in terms of foreign particles, and how often the process is required to be replaced.
Interesting... but the press release is pure garbage.
Hill's Ultra Z/D diet was 1st, but now we also use: CNM HA by Purina & EXclude by DVM dermatologics.
First of all, let me say that I am biased against organic foods, for no reason other than I think it is too trendy and some people buy as a status symbol, rather than for environmental/health concerns. For example, my friend's Prius driving mother who spends $25 on 'organic' laundry detergent, buys all her food at a co-op (my mom shops there too btw), while there are many people in this city who must chose between rent and food. I think it is wasteful to spend more money on food than necessary.
Some people I have met are opposed to GM foods for health concerns, but you CERTAINLY CAN BUY NON-MODIFIED PRODUCE AT ANY GROCERY STORE!! Any GM produce has a sticker with a 4 digit number beginning with 8. Organic begins with 9. VERY few foods at the supermarket begin with an 8. Most genetically modified food is found in processed foods (according to today's Minneapolis star-tribune newspaper), which is bad for you anyway. Anyone who is well informed about proper nutrition understands that a high-protein, low cholesterol, moderately fatty (good fats), balanced carbohydrate diet is best for your health. As my doctor once put it, eating "cave-man" foods is best for your health. Take responsibility for your own health! Don't eat lots of fried, or processed foods, even from restaurants! Conspiracy theories about "big-food" manipulating the FDA with bribes and hookers aside, I am sure that eating OilFresh fried foods once in a while is less harmful than eating ordinary fried food every day.
Also, another topic I think I should bring up is that applying better technology to food is arguably necessitated by one of the most accurate, prevailing theories of economics for the last two centuries. This is known as the Malthusian Model of Growth, and it has very accurately predicted population levels for humans and animals until roughly 1850. It doesn't take into account technology, but basically states that population will become constant (over the Long-Run) because land resources are finite. Without technology improving our food resouces, everyone will survive on the bare minimum (over the Long-Run), and growth will taper off.
What about those few people who run their VW's on old fryer oil? Can they filter out stray zeolite particles, or will the particles slowly erode the car's engines?
when I studied chemistry as an undergrad, one of the first thing we learned about was nomenclature, how difficult standards can be etc.
23 years later, I see the same problems over and over.
At issue here is what is meant by "nanotechnology"? TFA sites synthetic foods dyes as an example of first generation nanotech in food; does that mean that all synthetic organic chemistry is nanotechnology? We have been able to alter molecules in a batch process for food since cooking food maybe 100k years ago. So clearly, there is confusion about what is meant by this term.
The other huge nomenclature problem is what is meant by "organic"? I don't want to sound like a pedantic chemist, but very few consumers really understand this term. I get that we as consumers and parents want natural, unaltered, healthy food, but "organic" was really a poor descriptor of what this is about.
FWIW, I do subscribe to the idea that natural products are preferred over a synthetic substitute, but this has NOTHING to do with whether a molecule is organic, produced by nanotechnology or not. It has to due with metabolic pathways which have evolved over time eating naturally ocurring food.
When we substitute molecules that don't fit into natural pathways, we get unpredictable results. For some short term issues, this can be a good thing (like taking ibuprofen for pain), but for long-term dietary issues, this is wholly unknown and probably dangerous.
Anyway, some food for thought coming from a chemist, father, and natural product advocate.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Aren't we essentially solving problems that do not need solving? I understand that major food processing companies want to save a few pennies and also make crappy food more healthy by doing everything except affecting the taste, but in reality aren't we just kidding ourselves?
Food supply (at least in the west) is a problem long solved. We don't really need any breakthroughs in food technology. Shouldn't they be analyzing the things we do already to our food rather than trying to come up with new ways to save a quarter cent on the production of a pack of potato chips?
Maybe if we spent more time analyzing what we do and less time coming up with advances we don't need, we wouldn't have controversies like those with bovine growth hormone and transfat which comes out as a news item and tells us we've all been poisoning ourselves for years.
I suppose it's the priority of the corporate food enterprises to continue to find cheaper ways to produce things, but cheapness will eventually come at some cost somewhere else. Food is cheap enough here, and if it's unhealthy food people should learn to control their intake rather than the chip itself.
I suppose this is what happens when the FDA is more concerned about corporations than the people it is supposed to protect.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Would you like fries or a side order of grey goo, Mr. Drexler?
[/sarcasm]
As someone with Type 2 diabetes, I'm sick and tired of depending on the chemical nightmare of artificial sweetners, and the unknown (and in some cases known) risks that consuming them entails.
This development might enable scientists to easily and cheaply reverse the sugar molecule. Since our bodies are made to use right-handed sugar molecules, a left-handed one would be dumped as waste, with absolutely no difference in taste (the only down side would be diarrhea if you consume too much)!
Oh, to be able to eat chocolate cake again!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Also toothpaste and some tattoos. Am I supposed to be spooked by this?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
They keep inmates in prison fat so they are complacent. Welcome to the brave new world.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
It cant be worse than mcdonalds is for you..... and even if it is, they would be the first ones to sell it.
The problem is to take burnt, carbonised bits out of the old stinky oil, and excess water, partly absorbed by the old.
Mechanical filtering using a good old stocking, and paper filter works wonders. A centrifuge could also be put to good use. Gravity and natural separation works. Indians make Ghee all the time.
A patent search reveals zeolite is a handy catalyst used for donkeys, if coated with a heavy metal salt, with alum and silicates useful additives.
One speculates, oil 'varnish' will degrade this average chemical theory. A few tiny substitutions will do it.
Now where would you bury 1000 tonnes of stinky, oil staurated clayish gunk?
Advise to chip factory: I have not eaten chips for years - I am waiting for someone to sell nearly oil free chips - True Lite- when 25% of weight of end product is oil, that is not light.