There’s more to cereals than the contents of your breakfast bowl. Just ask Guelph food science professor Koushik Seetharaman. Helping to design more healthful grain-based products and widen markets for grain farmers and processors across the province is the purpose of his studies under an Industry Research Chair in Cereal Technology that was established at U of G three years ago.
Along with a nearly 20-strong research team, Seetharaman is working on key topics that connect plant breeders and growers all the way to your breakfast bowl and your dinner plate.
Funding for the $1.1-million endowed chair came from the Ontario Cereals Industry Research Council (OCIRC), the federally funded Agricultural Adaptation Council and U of G. The OCIRC represents cereal breeders, millers and processors in the province.
“We’ve got the entire value chain supporting the position,” says Seetharaman.
He is developing tools to help understand and improve functionality of cereal proteins. Protein networks in grain-based products are complicated and varied — just think of the difference between hard rye bread and fluffy white bread.
Learning more about those differences is important for growers, processors and consumers alike, including food processors looking to verify the properties of flour coming from grain millers, he says.
That information will also benefit breeders if the researchers can pinpoint genes associated with various proteins. “We hope to improve the next generation of wheat crop and breeding strategies.”
Seetharaman is also evaluating possible benefits of “pink” wheat as an alternative to traditionally grown white wheat and the reds that more farmers are now growing. Red wheats often darken whole-grain products, a turnoff for consumers demanding more of these foods. He says pinks might resist Fusarium — a common fungus — while still yielding attributes that consumers want.
Another health concern is acrylamide, a chemical that forms naturally in carbohydrate-rich foods cooked or processed at high temperatures. Think of darkened toast, spray-dried infant formula, french fries, potato chips and other fried foods, he says.
The substance is a potential carcinogen. Since early 2009, Health Canada has been assessing whether acrylamide poses a human health hazard and whether it needs to be regulated.
In the baking lab in the Food Science Building, the Guelph team is studying such questions as how and where the substance forms in order to minimize possible problems not just with baked goods but with other foods as well.
Seetharaman says Health Canada’s assessment is also important to help establish toxicity levels and comparative risks. As with any potential toxin, dose response is critical, he says.
That means young children with their smaller body mass might be more vulnerable than grownups. The science isn’t yet in, but Seetharaman says he avoids over-toasting bread for his four-year-old son, Samuel, and resists buying certain kinds of potato chips.
Wryly, he adds that — like generations of parents — he had exhorted his son to eat his bread crusts, precisely where acrylamides are most likely to form.
“Now I don’t say that,” says Seetharaman, a longtime vegetarian whose early exposure to his field involved tagging along as a child with his late father, an agricultural economist who travelled between farms in their native India.
Seetharaman’s wife, Debra Freedman, is a lecturer in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition.
The food scientist is also helping to dispel long-held wisdom in another area. Scientists and nutritionists used to claim that starch from one plant such as corn was the same as that from another plant like rice. His studies suggest that’s not the case, an important point for anyone trying to swap one formulation for another.
“Starch is not starch is not starch,” says Seetharaman, who, years before coming to Guelph, once served as an expert witness on a case pitting two companies in a dispute over starch formulations.
Now he’s looking at how plants make starch, beginning down at the molecular level. That involves working with other Guelph researchers. Here, molecular biologists, plant and food scientists, and human health and nutrition researchers are studying resistant starches intended ultimately to reduce diabetes risk by regulating the body’s insulin response to food carbohydrates.
Complementing that group’s work, Seetharaman is looking at how to process simple starches to temper the body’s response and avoid the blood glucose spikes that prompt rises in insulin and contribute to diabetes.
A graduate of Gujarat Agricultural University in India, Cornell University and Texas A&M University, he did post-doctoral work at Iowa State University, was on faculty at Penn State and was a consultant to the cereals industry before arriving at U of G. Besides now belonging to the largest food science department in North America — including faculty and students — he is the only food scientist working on soft wheat in eastern Canada.
That’s important to the province’s bakers and millers, says Peter Ilnyckyj, a business development consultant with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs in Guelph. He says Seetharaman connects industry, government and academia in research and teaching needed to maintain Ontario’s place among the top two or three jurisdictions in North American food processing.
Pointing to the number of researchers and students working in the food scientist’s labs, Ilnyckyj says: “That speaks volumes. Those people are going to go to industry, they’re going to go off and create wealth with firms, and the circle continues.”
Seetharaman also teaches an undergraduate cereals course and leads external workshops for industry.