Pfizer Promises Deliverance From Fat

Sounds unbelievable, but tis true. For the compulsive gourmet, hope is round the corner with low-calorie fat substitutes almost set to replace conventional fat-rich cooking mediums.

The wondrous fat-replacing agents which are both chemical and naturally-occurring mimic the unique flavour that fat imparts to food. And thats not all, they even cause fat-like chemical actions while cooking. Yet, they possess less than one-twentieth the calorie content of conventional animal and vegetable fat.

According to the Journal of Food Technologists, the chemical agents hydrocolloids do everything to food that fat would do like emulsifying, stabilising and encapsulating.

Multinational drug giant Pfizer has developed a hydrocolloid called litesse and has sought the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Says S Chakraborty, a food technology consultant: Litesse is the most promising of the new fat substitutes.

 

Litesse improves the mouth feel and viscosity, acts as a freezing point depressant as also a flavour carrier. It has a bland taste and, more importantly, only one calorie per gram as compared to 20 calories per gram.

Litesse is produced by a process of polymerisation and condensation of naturally occurring substances, sorbitel and citric acid. It is a water-soluble, white powder-like substance that forms a thick oil-like liquid at temperatures over 100 degrees centigrade.

Yet another potential fat substitute is Oatrim an oat derivative, which, apart from the advantage of low calories, gives the added benefit of lowering blood cholesterol.

Oatrim is prepared by converting oat starch in flour to multidestrins. On heating, Oatrim forms a fat-like gel with an amazing calorific value of less than one per gram.

Oatrim was developed by a group of small food processing companies in the US. The US National Centre for Agriculture Utilisation, which has okayed Oatrim for pilot-level tests, says it has been successfully tried out in ice creams, salads, frozen food, table butter, mayonnaise and in general cooking.

After fat substitutes, the next target of calorie-conscious scientists is meat. The Journal of Food Technologists says a process to separate fat from meat is being developed by the Inglelam food research institute in Germany.

The process, for use in the meat-processing industry, promises to reduce fat content in meat by over 60 per cent. Aside of the layers of meat around fat, there is considerable fat between meat fibres too, which is largely responsible for the high calories in meat.

Poultry, beef and pork subjected to this process will not lose any of its taste or fluid content, but only a majority of the fat. The technology behind the process, however, is not known.

In India too, traditional ayurveda offers a fair number of fat substitutes. Gum arabic, gum ghatti, gum karaya, gum tragacanth and pectin have been tried out by the Central Aromatic and Medicinal Plants Research Institute as replacements for animal and vegetable oil cooking mediums.