INNOVATION ..FOOD for the Gut
Research at Tata Chemicals
Innovation Centre provides a glimpse of how food supplements will be made in
future
Visitors to the Tata
Chemicals Innovation Centre in Pune are not always given Power Point
presentations. But they are certainly given stuff to eat, usually snacks that
the company has not yet launched.
These nibbles are meant to
be healthy, with no sugar and less oil than the usual fried food. Some of them
are also meant to help beneficial bacteria grow in your intestines.
Tata Chemicals is trying to
build a food business around the theme of health, an especially hard problem
when the definition of what constitutes healthy food keeps changing. Reducing
sugar and oil is generally considered healthy, but recent research has shown
that health and disease is far more complicated than what we imagined so far.
Specifically, the discovery of the role of microorganisms in disease has
uncovered an entirely new field that is growing in sophistication every day,
and providing clues to what really happens in our bodies. Tata Chemicals is
trying to build a business around the microbiome, the scientific name for the
complete set of microorganisms living in our bodies.
The Tata Chemicals
Innovation Centre is on a picturesque hill overlooking Pune city. It is small,
with about 60 scientists doing research, but the company owns most of the land
around it and hence has scope for expansion. “While this is an
applications-oriented R&D centre,“ says chief operating officer Arup Basu,
“one of the things I am keen on is for the scientists to have some curiosity.
Many scientific discoveries have come not with an end objective in mind.“
So the company has created
an environment, both physical and intellectual, where people are keen to do
science.“This is not a corporate environment,“ says Gopi Khatragada, chief
technology officer of the Tata Group. Scientists are encouraged to think about
their own scientific interests one day in a week. By design, the centre is
interdisciplinary with a strong background in basic sciences and not filled
with food scientists. So in the lab you find physicists, chemists, botanists,
molecular biologists and other researchers with no experience in food science.
Together they look at food science from many angles. To add some more intellec
tual power, they collaborate with some of the best universities in the country
and abroad.
Role of Bacteria
A collaboration between
Yale University and the Tata Group began last year, with the company committing
funding for five years. One of the projects in this partnership is between Tata
Chemicals and the department of immunobiology in Yale.Noah Palm, a professor at
the department, had been looking at the interactions between the gut bacteria
and the immune system. Tata Chemicals started a project with him to understand
the role of gut bacteria in health and disease, and specifically on the role of
prebiotics and gut bacteria and physiology.
The human body plays host
to a large variety and number of bacteria, whose role in disease is being
researched intensely only in the last one decade. The gut bacteria specifically
are now known to play an important role, promoting good health when its
composition is right and causing disease when it is not right. The diseases
they cause are serious ones: diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune diseases...
However, scientists are only beginning to understand the correlations between
gut bacterial composition and disease. They are still some way from
understanding the mechanisms behind the correlations.
Yale and Tata Chemicals
together look at two kinds of food products and gut bacteria:
fructooligosaccharides (FOS) and galactooligosaccharides (GOS). FOS are found
in nature, mainly in vegetables like onions, chicory root, garlic and
asparagus. They are sweet, indigestible and considered good food for beneficial
bacteria.GOS are found normally in human breast milk. “Our aim is to understand
the role of FOS and GOS and their impact on microbial composition when consumed
orally,“ says Noah Palm, assistant professor of immunology at Yale University.
“Our larger goal is to transition dietary supplements from a poorly-understood
field to a true understanding of the mechanisms by which they have their effects.“
FOS and GOS are sometimes
called prebiotics, and are be coming a popular form of dietary supplement.
They are different from
probiotics, which are the actual beneficial bacteria. Prebiotics provide food
for the bacteria. “When we take probiotics,“ says Khatragada, “we do not know
how long they re main in the gut. Prebiot ics make it convenient for the right
kind of bac teria to grow.“
The Yale-Tata programme
studies the effect of FOS and GOS on pure bacteria, a mix of bacteria, and
inside an actual animal gut. Scientists take germ-free mice, a form of mice
bred specifically for microbiome experiments, and trans plant human bacteria
into their gut. The mice are fed with FOS and GOS. Scientists then look at the
fecal sample for changes in bacterial composition, and at the blood for changes
in markers, molecules that indicate health or disease. It is as close to a
human experiment as is ethically possible.
Tata Chemicals already
sells FOS to food companies. Its long-term aim is to develop the right kind of
products, based on a true understanding of the influence of diet on the
microbiome. Research in Pune and with some Indian institutions has hinted at
the utility of traditional diets, especially of South India, in generating a
good mix of gut bacteria. “If you are eating good home food,“ says Basu,
“please stay with that. We are saying from a specific perspective, not an
emotional perspective, that you need to follow what your grandmother did.“ For
those who cannot do that, there may be healthy supplements available sometime
in the future.
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Hari
Pulakkat
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