Important health information missing in online food delivery menus

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

A University of Sydney study investigating menu items on major online food delivery outlets and applications (apps) in Australia has found most advertised items are missing nutritional information that would otherwise help consumers make healthy choices.  

Researchers say the findings show this information is largely absent or poorly provided on online food retail platforms and menu labelling laws need to keep up with increasing demand of online food delivery services.

The 2011 New South Wales Menu Labelling Scheme require large fast-food outlets to display both the average energy content (as Kilojoules) on menu items and the reference statement ‘the average daily energy intake is 8700 kJ’ at point of sale.

The kilojoule value must be next to the price of each item on menus: in store, at drive throughs, on internet ordering sites, and distributed via letterboxes. For example, if a burger on a menu item provides 2058 kJ.

The definition of large food outlets are franchises or chains with more than 20 locations in the state or 50 locations nationally.

From 10 randomly selected suburbs across Sydney, the study reviewed 43 unique large food outlets on online food delivery services.

A total of 482 menus from UberEats, Menulog and Deliveroo were reviewed.

Less than 6 percent of menus of food outlets on third party online food delivery applications (apps) such as UberEats, Menulog and Deliveroo had complete kilojoule labelling (where all items on the menu had kilojoule labelling). Since the study, Deliveroo no longer operates in Australia.

There were also large inconsistencies in kilojoule labeling between different locations for the same franchise store and between the type of delivery service, whether it was in house company owned apps (e.g. Dominos) or third-party delivery services (e.g. UberEats).

“The results are concerning and highlight the largely unregulated digital environment where young people increasingly use apps to make food purchases,” says lead author and PhD Candidate Sisi Jia, from the Charles Perkins Centre and Susan Wakil School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Sydney.

“Displaying the kilojoule content on a menu item is important to help people make informed health choices. There are multiple studies that show menu labelling having real world impact–- that consumers who were provided with nutritional information selected meals with significantly lower energy content,

“Although there is increasing demand of food delivery services, it is unknown how well menu labelling is implemented by online platforms,

“To our knowledge, there are currently no public health policies or nutritional labelling requirements that specifically cover online food delivery platforms.”

Key findings

• Large food outlets on UberEats, Menulog and Deliveroo were found to have only 4.8 percent, 5.3 percent and 3.6 percent complete nutritional labeling respectively.
• Only 35 percent of large fast-food franchise outlets on company apps such as MyMaccas had complete kilojoule labelling.
• Over 75 percent of menu items from mid-sized food outlets (that had more than five locations across the state) could be classified as ‘unhealthy’ under independent guidelines although exempt from providing nutritional information under current laws.

The findings were published in Public Health Nutrition.

NSW Menu labelling laws need to be updated to reflect rise of online food delivery

Use of online food delivery serves has grown rapidly, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, two-fifths of people in Australian capital cities were using those services and the primary users were millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012).

The researchers say current NSW menu labelling laws were written with traditional food environments in mind and need to be updated.

“The inconsistent kilojoule labelling on online food delivery services, shows we need swift and clear leadership on how the NSW Menu Labelling scheme and any future schemes are applied on online food retail platforms,” says Dr Stephanie Partridge from the Charles Perkins Centre and Susan Wakil School of Nursing and Midwifery.

A previous study found over 80 percent of popular menu items advertised were classified as discretionary, meaning they are high in added salt, saturated fat, added sugar or low in dietary fibre according to the Australian Dietary Guidelines.

Online food delivery is also making it easier for people to buy food of low nutritional quality, say the researchers.

Co-author Dr Alice Gibson from the Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics and The Charles Perkins Centre said over 35 percent of children’s diets in Australia are comprised of discretionary junk foods which may increase risk of chronic diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

“One of the aims of the 2021-2030 National Preventive Health Strategy is to improve access to and the consumption of a healthy diet,” says Dr Gibson.  

“Food delivery services are a convenient service in response to consumer demand. The way we access food has become more ‘digital’ – public health nutrition policies need to keep up.”

-ENDS-

Declaration: The researchers declare no conflicts of interest. The article draws on research by former University of Sydney Masters students Sophia Cassano and Anna Jia.

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JOURNAL

Public Health Nutrition

DOI

10.1017/S1368980024000673 

COI STATEMENT

Declaration: The researchers declare no conflicts of interest. The article draws on research by former University of Sydney Masters students Sophia Cassano and Anna Jia.

 

Untangling dreams and our waking lives

CNS 2024

COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE SOCIETY

Sunday, April 14, 2024 - Toronto - “Dreams are messages from the deep.” (Dune Part 1) Musings about dreams abound throughout society, from movies to TV to books. But despite being a constant source of fascination, the role of dreams in our lives still remains elusive. As recently noted in the TV show Grey’s Anatomy: “Honestly, no one knows why we dream or why we have nightmares.” While true, neuroscientists are finding innovative new ways to study dreams and how they influence our cognition.

“Understanding how dreams are generated and what their function might be — if any — is one of science's biggest open questions right now,” says Remington Mallett of University of Montréal, who is chairing a session today at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) in Toronto. “Because we don't know much about dreams, it is hard to estimate their full impact on our waking lives. But current results suggest that indeed dreams influence our waking experiences.” 

As presented at CNS 2024, researchers are finding not only novel approaches to exploring dreams and the architecture of sleep, but also ways to engineer dreams to help people suffering from sleep disorders. In the process, scientists are seeing how perceptions of dreams and sleep quality often differ greatly from the objective measures traditionally used to evaluate them.

Perceptions versus reality

Claudia Picard-Deland posits that dreams are a window into understanding sleep quality. She and colleagues at the University of Montréal design studies that wake sleepers many times in the night to determine how the participants perceive their sleep. 

“Dreams are not studied a lot in the context of sleep quality. The focus is more often on objective measures like brain activity or sleep stage, but I think we need to look closer at dream activity and its impact on how we perceive sleep.” For people who suffer from insomnia and related disorders, perception of sleep is reality, and their dreams could offer possible ways to help shape those perceptions.

In their latest, unpublished study, Picard-Deland and colleagues woke 20 “good sleepers” some 12 times in the night, representing all four classic sleep stages at three different times in the night. At each awakening, the researchers would ask whether they had been awake or asleep, how deeply they were sleeping, what was last in their minds, and how immersed they felt in their dreams.

They found that sleep misperception — feeling awake even when electrodes measured they were asleep — was common among participants, especially in the early, dreamless stages of sleep. Likewise, they found that when the participants were able to recall their dreams, they perceived their sleep as deeper. “And when they are more immersed in their dreams, feel more physically present, or have more vivid dreams, they wake up feeling their sleep was deeper compared to when they have no, or light, dream activity,” Picard-Deland says.

The researchers were surprised to see how frequently participants thought they had been awake when they were actually sleeping (“paradoxical insomnia”) and in the deeper, slow-wave phase of sleep. This work builds upon similar previous findings and has important implications for how scientists understand the architecture of sleep, as well as for people who report insomnia. 

As someone who has experienced insomnia her whole life, Picard-Deland thinks it is crucial for people to realize that they may be sleeping more than they think. “It helped me to see it with my own eyes, happening in front of me, that participants were sleeping yet still felt awake.” Beyond that understanding, this work could have future applications for sleep rehabilitation based on dreams. For example, Picard-Deland would love to explore whether dream training, such as teaching people how to experience more immersive lucid dreams, could lead to better perceived sleep quality. 

Lucid dreams as a tool

Lucid dreams are an important part of the work of Saba Al-Youssef whose team at Sorbonne Université leverages the ability of lucid dreamers to use facial muscles during sleep as a new tool for gathering data. “Dreams are a hidden world to which we have no direct access,” she says. “We mostly rely on dream reports no matter what study method we use. The capacity of lucid dreamers to communicate with us in real time gives us side door access to dreams, at least knowing when a specific event is happening.”

In a new study with researchers at Northwestern University, Al-Youssef and colleagues aim to better understand how the brain acts during dreams in comparison to its behavior when awake. When people are awake and close their eyes, visual content disappears and specific electrical signals occur. Researchers therefore wondered what happens in the brain when someone closes their eyes in a dream. They hope to better understand the neural correlates of visual perception during dreams.

The researchers recruited participants who included lucid dreamers with narcolepsy. Over the course of five naps, the researchers instructed participants to close and open their “dream eyes” and signal so by sniffing once or twice. They then asked those with narcolepsy to report whether they had visual content in each condition by frowning or smiling. 

“Surprisingly, we've found that closing our ‘dream eyes’ is not always accompanied by a loss of vision, as is the case when we're awake,” Al-Youssef says. “I hope this work would help show how using lucid dreams can be helpful in studying dreams and even understanding their function.”

Mallett is excited to see work like this to develop new methodology for studying dreams. “I think most scientists are skeptical that dreams can be studied, so before I tell them about what we found, I need to convince them that we can find something,” Mallett says, “that we have the methods and tools to make discoveries about dreams.”

Both Picard-Deland’s and Al-Youssef’s work open new avenues of research in manipulating dreams through new technology and with immediate clinical benefits. “You need to manipulate dreams for good experimentation, and you need to manipulate dreams to reduce nightmares,” he says. “Nightmares are incredibly frustrating for a variety of clinical populations, and there is great need for approaches to reducing them. Understanding how dreams are formed, and how to change them, is already laying paths forward for efficient nightmare reduction protocols.”

Overall, the body of work presented at CNS 2024 is showing the myriad ways dreams affect our waking lives. “This is rather unsurprising when you consider that dreams are experiences, and your prior experience is always going to impact your experiences going forward.” The work also echoes a fundamental lesson from cognitive neuroscience, that whether awake or asleep, our perceptions of the world are but imperfect creations in our minds. 

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The symposium “Into the Night: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Dreaming” is taking place at 1:30pmEDT on Sunday, April 14, as part of the CNS 2024 annual meeting from April 13-16, 2024 in Toronto, Canada.

CNS is committed to the development of mind and brain research aimed at investigating the psychological, computational, and neuroscientific bases of cognition. Since its founding in 1994, the Society has been dedicated to bringing its 2,000 members worldwide the latest research to facilitate public, professional, and scientific discourse.

School suspensions and exclusions put vulnerable children at risk

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Managing problematic student behaviour is one of the most persistent, challenging, and controversial issues facing schools today. Yet despite best intentions to build a more inclusive and punitive-free education system, school suspensions and expulsions remain.

 

Now, new research from the University of South Australia shows that exclusionary practices not only fail to identify the deep-rooted causes of challenging student behaviours but exacerbate negative issues rather than resolve them.

 

Lead researcher, UniSA’s Professor Anna Sullivan, says schools face difficult decisions around suspensions and expulsions.

 

“Suspensions and expulsions have been the mainstay of schools’ behaviour management practices for decades, regardless of research finding that they are ineffective for disciplining bad behaviours,” Prof Sullivan says.

 

“In fact, there is a clear relationship between school suspensions and a range of detrimental health outcomes, including alienation from school, involvement with antisocial peers, use of alcohol and smoking, and a lower quality of school life – and this contributes to a higher risk of dropping out of school and possible illegal behaviour.

 

“What makes things worse is that vulnerable students have a higher risk of being suspended or expelled, which in many cases exacerbates their circumstances and life chances.

 

“Boys, Aboriginal students, students from low SES backgrounds, and students with a disability are disproportionately excluded from schools.

 

“There is a distinct blind spot about how school suspensions and expulsions perpetuate wider social inequalities.

 

“Schools and policy makers must look beyond challenging behaviours to understand what is contributing to the cause – rather than treating the effect – and it’s this missing information that’s needed to develop new school policies.”

 

Analysing the recently reviewed NSW Student Behaviour Strategy, researchers found that while there was more behaviour support and management, the new iterations still included punitive practices.

 

“When a student is suspended or expelled from school, we’re ultimately removing them from their education and limiting their life outcomes. And knowing that vulnerable groups are more at risk, these exclusion policies are ultimately discriminatory,” Prof Sullivan says.

 

“We also see situations where children with disabilities – some on prescribed medications – are being excluded from school on the basis that ‘they have problems already’. As a consequence, exclusion appears to be a reasonable solution given schools do not have the time, expertise or resources to manage complex and challenging behavioural needs. 

 

“Adding to such deficit thinking is removing a ‘problem child’ from the learning environment of others. Instead of helping these students, the policies are exacerbating their struggles.

 

“What we need is more listening, more empathy to students at risk, and a willingness to challenge the impact of wider social inequalities including poverty, race, housing, and unemployment on the most vulnerable people in society. These things do not operate in isolation; they affect families and children and cannot simply be left at the school gate.

 

“It’s time to look afresh at the complex and challenging circumstances in which many young people find themselves. Only then can we hope to create a more inclusive and fair education system.”

 

 

Notes to editors:

 

• Published paper: Down, B., Sullivan, A., Tippett, N., Johnson, B., Manolev, J., & Robinson, J., (2024). What is missing in policy discourses about school exclusions?, Critical Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2024.2312878

 

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Media contact: Annabel Mansfield M: + 61 479 182 489 E: Annabel.Mansfield@unisa.edu.au

Researcher: Prof Anna Sullivan E: Anna.Sullivan@unisa.edu.au

 

 

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JOURNAL

Critical Studies in Education

DOI

10.1080/17508487.2024.2312878 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Literature review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Critical Studies in Education

COI STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

 

Tuberculosis can have a lasting impact on the lung health of individuals who have been successfully treated for the disease

Smaller lungs, narrower airways and slower airflow could have a profound effect on long-term health

EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF CLINICAL MICROBIOLOGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES

Finding strongly indicates that post-TB lung disease is an under-recognised global challenge, UK researchers say

New research being presented at this year’s ESCMID Global Congress (formerly ECCMID) in Barcelona, Spain (27-30 April) has found compelling evidence that tuberculosis (TB) can have a lasting impact on the lungs of individuals who have been successfully treated for the disease.

TB survivors have smaller lungs with narrower airways and slower air flow, the analysis of data on tens of thousands of individuals from around the world found.

“This damage could have a profound effect on long-term health, reduce quality of life and affect ability to work and carry out day-to-day tasks,” says lead researcher Dr Sharenja Ratnakumar, of St George’s, University of London, London, UK. “And, with growing numbers of people being successfully treated for TB, the finding strongly indicates that post-TB lung disease is an under-recognised global challenge.”

TB can be cured with antibiotics and, worldwide, an estimated 155 million people are alive today as a result of successful diagnosis and treatment of the bacterial infection.

However, although significant progress has been made in combating TB in recent decades, the number of new diagnoses has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic.  Some 7.5 million were diagnosed globally in 2022 – the highest number since monitoring began in 1995 and above the pre-Covid baseline of 7.1 million in 2019, according to WHO’s 2023 Global Tuberculosis Report.1

The burden is highest in sub-Saharan Africa and south east Asia but even low incidence countries such as the UK are seeing diagnoses increase. According to provisional data from the UK Health Security Agency, there were 4,850 new diagnoses in England in 2023.  This is above pre-Covid levels and represents a rise of more than 10% on 2022, when there were 4,380 diagnoses.2

Previous research has found that between 18% and >80% of survivors will be left with lung damage3 that reduces their quality of life and life expectancy4 but data on the size and type of respiratory impairment is scarce. To find out more, Dr Ratnakumar and colleagues carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis of existing research on the topic.

The Medline, Embase and CINAHL databases were searched from 1/01/00 to 31/01/23 for studies that compared the lung function of individuals with a history of TB with that of healthy controls.

The meta-analysis included data on 75,631 individuals from 15 studies conducted in 17 countries with varying TB incidence and income levels.

The 7,377 TB survivors had an average age range of 11-65 years.  Many of the studies were skewed towards a younger population (<50years) from mainly low- and middle-income countries.

Four measures of lung function were included in the analysis: forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1, the volume of air can be forcefully exhaled in one second); forced vital capacity (FVC, the volume of air that can be forcefully exhaled in a single breath); FEV1/FVC ratio; FVC as a percentage of the predicted value (compares the volume to the average of a healthy person of the same age, sex and height).

The study, which was supported by the charity Breathing Matters, found that, compared to the healthy controls, the participants with prior TB had significantly lower results on all four measures of lung function, with FEV1 more affected than FVC.

Dr Ratnakumar says: “FEV1 was 230 millilitres lower compared to healthy controls and FVC was 140 millilitres lower.  A decrease in FEV1 of 100 millilitres is considered clinically significant and is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular and respiratory disease.”5

The results as a whole point to the TB survivors having smaller lungs (restrictive disease) and narrower airways with slower air flow (obstructive disease). This means that the breaths they take are smaller and take longer; breathing is less efficient and less able to respond to increased ventilatory demands such as during exercise. 

Analysis of data from five of the studies showed the TB survivors to have 65% higher odds of airflow obstruction (AFO) than the healthy controls.

The results suggest TB can leave a lasting and widespread impact on the lungs, especially in terms of how the airways are structured. This valuable insight can help guide rehabilitation strategies and, in the longer term, aid in the development of new therapies, say the researchers.

Dr Ratnakumar explains: “Our results strongly indicate that post-tuberculosis lung disease is an under-recognised global challenge – and one that has significant implications for clinical practice and policy.

“The focus, until now, has been on the treatment of acute TB, but even when treatment is successful, individuals can be left with significant lung damage.

“This can cause breathlessness that can affect their ability to work and go about their day-to-day lives and reduces their quality of life.  

“This legacy of TB has been overlooked for too long and it is vital it is recognised.

“With an estimated 74 million lives saved through tuberculosis treatment between 2000 and 2020 and a rising life expectancy, there is an urgent need for evidence-based recommendations on the diagnosis, treatment and management of post-tuberculosis lung disease.

“Our study also provides compelling evidence that the long-term care of individuals with post-tuberculosis lung disease should be an explicit component of the WHO’s End TB strategy.”

References:

1. www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-reports/global-tuberculosis-report-2023
2. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tb-cases-rise-in-england
3. https://europepmc.org/article/med/29491034
4. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(19)30309-3/abstract
5. https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/31/2/416

 

 

 

 

 

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ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Apr-2024

 

Researchers shed light on the molecular causes of different functions of opioid receptors

Potent active substances

UNIVERSITÄT LEIPZIG

Drugs that target opioid receptors sometimes have severe side effects. Thousands of people around the world die every day from overdoses involving opioids such as fentanyl. An international team of researchers has taken a closer look at the molecular mechanisms of these active substances. The research, carried out by Dr Matthias Elgeti, a biophysicist at Leipzig University, in collaboration with research groups from the US and China, has now been published in the journal Nature.

Opioid receptors are of great pharmacological interest because opioid substances regulate the perception of pain. “Our findings provide insights into how an opioid receptor can perform different functions. It is able to reduce pain, but also to regulate digestion or breathing,” explains Dr Elgeti, co-first author of the study from the Institute for Drug Discovery at the Faculty of Medicine.

In the current study, the biophysicist collaborated with international scientists, including the research group of Nobel laureate Brian Kobilka from Stanford University. They discovered that superagonists, such as fentanyl, stabilise a state of the receptor that causes particularly effective and long-lasting signal transmission. This means that superagonists are particularly potent and therefore dangerous. In the current study, the researchers used electron spin resonance and single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy to determine different states of the opioid receptor and the structural effects of different binding partners.

Opioid receptors are members of the large family of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), which control many signalling processes in the body, such as taste and smell, while others bind neurotransmitters and hormones or are activated by light. Understanding the molecular interactions of these receptors with drugs and other signalling proteins is very important for drug development. As all GPCRs are structurally very similar, the researchers hope that their findings on the opioid receptor can be applied to other receptors.

“This study involved isolating the opioid receptors. They are normally found in the body’s cells, interacting with many other proteins and molecules. Further research into the molecular interactions is therefore needed to gain a full understanding of the regulatory mechanisms,” says Dr Elgeti. The new study is an important building block in basic research, with further studies needed to ultimately develop better and safer medicines.

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-07295-2 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

ARTICLE TITLE

Ligand efficacy modulates conformational dynamics of the µ-opioid receptor

 

Allowing consumers who purchased goods online to return them to retail stores can be a win-win

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Many consumers who shop online prefer to return items to brick-and-mortar stores rather than mail them back. In a new study, researchers assessed a new practice called return partnership, in which online retailers partner with retailers with physical stores to offer offline returns. They conclude that this arrangement can benefit both online and store retailers, though businesses should be careful to choose the right partners.

The study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington (UW), has been submitted for publication.

“Retailers are increasingly adopting a variety of ways to return products to cater to customers’ preferences,” explains Soo-Haeng Cho, IBM Professor of Operations Management and Strategy at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon, who co-authored the study. “These new approaches can be a win-win for online sellers and stores.”

To reduce problems for consumers who want to return goods without having to package and mail them, online retailers (e.g., Amazon) have begun to partner with firms that own a network of physical stores (e.g., Kohl’s) so customers can drop off returns of their online purchases. The partnerships usually do not involve direct monetary payment to the store retailers. The store retailers benefit from purchases made during customers’ visits to stores and online retailers save on shipping costs (the retailer collects and ships multiple returned items from a physical store, which is less costly than individual mail-in returns).

In this study, researchers examined the incentives of online retailers and store retailers in this unique partnership. Cho and his team constructed a model with an online retailer and a store retailer in which customers had several options for buying and returning goods. The study compared the expected profit of the retailers before and after a return partnership was formed and identified when both retailers benefitted from the partnership.

Among the study’s findings:

• Online retailers benefitted from shifting returns to a cost-effective channel, and store retailers benefitted from having more people in their stores.
• Return partnerships can occur with no direct financial transaction between the online and store retailers; the partnership can work when the incentive for the two retailers is based only on how it affects consumer behavior. 
• Such partnerships can feature store partners that operate few stores but offer products similar to those of online retailers, or those that have a large store network but offer differentiated products.
• Online retailers that offer convenient online shopping and lenient returns are best poised to benefit from return partnerships. Online retailers with strict return policies (e.g., high restocking fees) should carefully examine the return rate increasing effects of entering a partnership. 
• Firms should choose their partners to ensure the offline return service benefits their overall business. For example, an online retailer and a store retailer with comparable products have incentives to partner only if the number of stores is not too large because consumers may be swayed to return to stores by the possibility of finding replacements for whatever product they are returning. This would lead to more consumers opting to return their online purchases, which hurts the online retailer’s profit.

“By modeling consumers’ purchase and return decisions and their impact on retailers’ sales, our work provides insights into the types of online retailers that should form partnerships,” says Leela Nageswaran, Assistant Professor of Operations Management at UW’s Foster School of Business, who co-authored the study.

“Attempts to forge return partnerships with store retailers must emphasize the sales boost from returning customers,” adds Elina Hwang, Associate Professor of Information Systems at UW’s Foster School of Business, who co-authored the study. 

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JOURNAL

Management Science

DOI

10.1287/mnsc.2023.01291 

ARTICLE TITLE

Offline Returns for Online Retailers via Partnership

 

Food scientists are finding ways to preserve food quality and ensure food safety

Food scientists develop framework to preserve food quality and still kill pathogens

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS SYSTEM DIVISION OF AGRICULTURE

 

IMAGE: 

ARSHPREET KHATTRA WAS THE LEAD AUTHOR OF A STUDY THAT DEVELOPED A FRAMEWORK FOR FOOD PROCESSORS TO PRESERVE QUALITY AND MAINTAIN FOOD SAFETY. 

view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS SYSTEM DIVISION OF AGRICULTURE

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Sometimes the processing that makes food safe can compromise flavor and nutrients, but food scientist Jennifer Acuff is looking for a way to make food safe and minimize loss of quality.

Food processors often use heat for pasteurization or sterilization to make food products safe by killing pathogens like salmonella and listeria, but high temperatures can degrade food quality. To ensure food safety, the industry sometimes relies on overly stringent standards that unnecessarily reduce food quality, said Jennifer Acuff, assistant professor of food microbiology and safety for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

Focusing on low-moisture food products like powdered milk, Acuff and her team performed a study seeking a method that guarantees food safety while retaining the most vitamins, minerals and flavor depending on the food.

“This collaborative approach encompassed microbiology, engineering, and statistics to provide the food industry with what we believe will be a tool to improve safety without compromising quality of their dried food products,” Acuff said.

The process is not limited to low-moisture foods and may extend to other foods and processes, Acuff added.

Using data from a study on a harmless “surrogate” microorganism and a statistical technique called “bootstrapping,” the researchers developed a framework to provide food processors options within U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

“We have proposed a methodology to pick a value between the most liberal and most conservative food processing approaches based on risk tolerances,” said Jeyam Subbiah, head of the food science department. “The industry can use this methodology to pick a value and petition the FDA for approval.”

While there is no specific FDA rule, the government currently asks the food processing industry to make a petition for a case-by-case review.

The study, “Bootstrapping for Estimating the Conservative Kill Ratio of the Surrogate to the Pathogen for Use in Thermal Process Validation at the Industrial Scale,” was published online by the Journal of Food Production in March. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Mars Wrigley Inc. supported the study.

“Surrogates are like dummies used in crash testing to validate car safety,” Subbiah said. “They are non-pathogenic microorganisms, which should have similar or higher heat resistance than the actual pathogen. Often, they are a lot more resistant.”

Scientists use a “log cycle reduction,” or LCR for short, to calculate how effectively a process kills harmful microorganisms. “Log” refers to the logarithm scale, and 1-log represents a 10-fold reduction equivalent to a 90 percent reduction in bacteria. A 2-log reduction would be a 99 percent reduction, 3-log 99.9 percent, and so on. A 6-log reduction is a 99.9999 percent reduction.

When surrogate microorganisms are used for food safety challenge studies for sterilization of canned foods, the Institute of Food Thermal Processing Specialists recommends a “simple mean,” or average, kill ratio to validate food safety at an industrial scale. For example, Subbiah said if sterilization called for a “12-log” reduction of the pathogen and the surrogate was twice as resistant, a processor could show a “6-log” kill of the surrogate, and the FDA would accept it as equivalent.

However, the drawback of that method is that it does not consider the variability of microorganisms, both the pathogen and the surrogate, Subbiah noted.

Although less prone to foodborne pathogens than fresh meats and dairy, low-moisture foods are not immune. Various types of salmonella have been implicated in 15 deaths, thousands of illnesses, and hundreds of hospitalizations over the past 20 years due to infected low-moisture foods like dried fruits and vegetables, nuts, herbs, flour and spices.

After those food safety outbreaks, the food industry “swung to the conservative mode” in food safety challenge studies, Subbiah said, by requiring the same level of log reduction of the surrogate. For example, if sterilization of spices calls for a 12-log reduction of salmonella, the industry would show a 12-log reduction of the surrogate even though it can be twice as resistant as the pathogen. While this assures a high level of food safety, nutrients may be degraded due to severe thermal processing, Subbiah explained.

Calculating the risk

As a food science graduate student in the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, Arshpreet Khattra used previously published data from Subbiah’s lab involving the surrogate Enterococcus faecium to develop a solution for preserving quality in thermal processing. She applied the bootstrapping technique to estimate the distribution of kill ratio in milk powders rather than calculate the “simple mean,” or average, kill ratio.

With bootstrapping, scientists can deal with uncertainty in experimental data by generating many samples instead of assuming a specific distribution. The technique calls for randomly picked data points from the original data to give researchers a good idea of how much the results may vary due to chance. It has been used in various studies to improve food processing methods and assess the food safety risks of different microbes in various foods.

From the estimate of kill ratio distribution, the final kill ratio can be calculated on a sliding scale of risk, Subbiah noted. In a hypothetical example, to have a 1 percent risk level, a processor may want a 9-log reduction of the surrogate, which is a 99.9999999 percent reduction. A 5 percent risk level would call for an 8-log reduction, and a 10 percent risk would call for a 6.5-log decrease of the surrogate to be equivalent to a 12-log reduction of the pathogen. A 12-log reduction is typically called sterilization and a 4- to 5-log reduction qualifies as pasteurization.

This method strikes a balance between killing harmful bacteria and preserving quality, Subbiah said.

Khattra is now a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University. Co-authors of the study included Subbiah, Acuff, Kevin Thompson and Andy Mauromoustakos with the Division of Agriculture’s Center for Agricultural Data Analytics, and Surabhi Wason, Ph.D., now with Kerry Ingredients & Flavours in Wisconsin.

Khattra examined data collected in a 2021 study evaluating Enterococcus faecium as a surrogate for salmonella in milk powders at different storage times and temperatures. Subbiah was a co-author of the study led by Xinyao Wei when they were at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A wide range of foods incorporate powdered milk, including candy bars and baby formula.

To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu. Follow on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @AgInArk. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu.

About the Division of Agriculture

The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system.

The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on five system campuses.

The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs and services without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status, and is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

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DOI

10.1016/j.jfp.2024.100264 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Bootstrapping for Estimating the Conservative Kill Ratio of the Surrogate to the Pathogen for Use in Thermal Process Validation at the Industrial Scale

 

Bonobos are more aggressive than previously thought

CELL PRESS

 

IMAGE: 

BONOBOS

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CREDIT: MAUD MOUGINOT

Chimpanzees and bonobos are often thought to reflect two different sides of human nature—the conflict-ready chimpanzee versus the peaceful bonobo—but a new study publishing April 12 in the journal Current Biology shows that, within their own communities, male bonobos are more frequently aggressive than male chimpanzees. For both species, more aggressive males had more mating opportunities.

“Chimpanzees and bonobos use aggression in different ways for specific reasons,” says anthropologist and lead author Maud Mouginot of Boston University. “The idea is not to invalidate the image of bonobos being peaceful—the idea is that there is a lot more complexity in both species.”

Though previous studies have investigated aggression in bonobos and chimpanzees, this is the first study to directly compare the species’ behavior using the same field methods. The researchers focused on male aggression, which is often tied to reproduction, but they note that female bonobos and chimpanzees are not passive, and their aggression warrants its own future research.

To compare bonobo and chimpanzee aggression, the team scrutinized rates of male aggression in three bonobo communities at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve (Democratic Republic of Congo) and two chimpanzee communities at Gombe National Park (Tanzania). Overall, they examined the behavior of 12 bonobos and 14 chimpanzees by conducting “focal follows,” which involved tracking one individual’s behavior for an entire day and taking note of how often they engaged in aggressive interactions, who these interactions were with, and whether they were physical or not (e.g., whether the aggressor engaged in pushing and biting or simply chased their adversary).

“You go to their nests and wait for them to wake up and then you just follow them the entire day— from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep at night—and record everything they do,” says Mouginot.

To their surprise, the researchers found that male bonobos were more frequently aggressive than chimpanzees. Overall, bonobos engaged in 2.8 times more aggressive interactions and 3 times as many physical aggressions.

While male bonobos were almost exclusively aggressive toward other males, chimpanzees were more likely to act aggressively toward females. Chimpanzee aggression was also more likely to involve “coalitions” of males (13.2% vs. 1% of bonobo aggressions). The researchers think that these coalitions might be one reason why aggression is less frequent among chimpanzees. Altercations involving groups of males have the potential to cause more injuries, and within-community fighting could also weaken the group’s ability to fight off other groups of chimpanzees. Bonobos don’t have this issue because most of their disputes are one on one, they have never been observed to kill one another, and they are not thought to be territorial, which leaves their communities free to bicker among themselves.

For both chimpanzees and bonobos, more aggressive males had greater mating success. The researchers were surprised to find this in bonobos, which have a co-dominant social dynamic in which females often outrank males, compared to chimpanzees, which have male-dominated hierarchies in which male coalitions coerce females into mating.

“Male bonobos that are more aggressive obtain more copulations with females, which is something that we would not expect,” said Mouginot. “It means that females do not necessarily go for nicer males.”

These findings partially contradict a prevailing hypothesis in primate and anthropological behavior—the self-domesticating hypothesis—which posits that aggression has been selected against in bonobos and humans but not chimpanzees.

The researchers were not able to assess the severity of aggressive interactions in terms of whether they resulted in wounds or injuries, but this is data that they hope to collect in future. They also want to compare aggressive behavior in other groups of chimpanzees and bonobos as it’s possible that behavior varies between communities and subspecies.

“I'd love to have the study complemented with comparable data from other field sites so we can get a broader understanding of variation within and between species,” says Mouginot.

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This research was supported by Harvard University, Duke University, Franklin and Marshall College, George Washington University, the University of Minnesota, the Max Planck Society, the Institute for Advanced Study Toulouse, the Leakey Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Arcus Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, the Leo S. Guthman Foundation, Margo Marsh, Mazuri, the Morris Animal Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Harris Steel Group, the Waitt Foundation, the William T. Grant Q12 Foundation, the Windibrow Foundation, and the Jane Goodall Institute.

Current Biology, Mouginot et al., “Differences in expression of male aggression between wild bonobos and chimpanzees” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)00253-7

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2024.02.071 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Differences in expression of male aggression between wild bonobos and chimpanzees

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Apr-2024