Introducing Inside Academia

A new bimonthly column called Inside Academia debuts in Food Technology this month that will feature university research developments, breakthroughs, and programs in the areas of food science and technology, as well as diet, health, and nutrition. The digital version of Food Technology on ift.org will also have videos that accompany the column so viewers can see and hear food scientists and other academic researchers explain their work.

The focus of this column will be on what is new, noteworthy, or otherwise significant in food science and nutrition research, especially studies that are relevant to industry and that have findings with potential commercial applications.

Often this new column will focus on research conducted by IFT members and profile interesting scientists and technologists who are advancing the science of food. This will complement coverage of other noteworthy initiatives by academic members of IFT, which are regularly highlighted in the IFT World section of the magazine. 

This month’s column is about research into foods that may help prevent cancer, currently underway at The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, Ohio. OSU is a land-grant university with departments of agriculture, food science, public health, nutrition, and medicine and a comprehensive cancer center that enables investigators to collaborate effectively and to speed the transfer of knowledge.

“We have wonderful collaborators that work together from horticulture, food science, nutrition, and medicine, crossing over three different colleges here on campus that work together to try to understand functional foods using a theme that we call ‘crops to the clinic,’” says Steven Schwartz, an IFT member and Fellow who is a professor in the Department of Food Science at OSU and director of the Center for Advanced Functional Foods Research and the co-director of the Food Innovation Center.

Schwartz said the design of one of the studies they are doing is a pre-surgical model involving men diagnosed with prostate cancer who are given a soy-tomato juice developed at OSU.

“There’s about a three- to four-week period from the time they’re diagnosed with prostate cancer and enrolled in the study and they undergo surgery. So that provides us a unique window to conduct a nutritional intervention study with our soy-tomato juice,” Schwartz explains.

Food scientists at OSU worked for months to perfect the flavor of the soy-tomato juice and used a high-lycopene variety of tomatoes cultivated by OSU’s Department of Agriculture.

“Most tomatoes that you find out in the market, the lycopene in the tomato is in a particular form, which is all-trans form. We want it in a cis form because that’s more bioavailable. So there was some growing of the tomatoes, specific tomatoes, for this project that took place,” explains Yael Vodovotz, a professor in the Department of Food Science at OSU and an IFT member.

“We can take blood samples, urine samples, and the unique aspect is when they have their surgeries, we actually get biopsies of the prostate tissue, so we can measure the bioactive compounds that are absorbed and deposited in the tissue. We can try to understand the metabolism that may be affecting prostate cancer progression. That would give an indication that the functional food might be inhibiting the cancer growth,” Schwartz says.

Steven Clinton, a professor in the College of Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology at OSU, and an IFT member, is equally enthusiastic about the collaborative research they are doing.

“This is the kind of work that is a prelude to what we really need, which are large-scale multi-institutional human studies to prove whether they actually have anti-cancer activity,” Clinton says. “We spend billions every year treating chronic disease. If we spent only a fraction of that money on research, on foods, nutrition, physical activity, and lifestyle factors, we could get these answers quickly. The effort needs to start in Washington with the investment in the kind of research that’s going to get the answers that actually lower our health-care burden, save the nation money, and make people live longer, happier, and healthier.”

This new column will serve as another means of highlighting the great work that’s being done in food science and technology. The column is an outcome of the IFT Academic Advisory Group report, which recommended greater visibility of academic achievements that serve as a catalyst for innovation in industry, academia, and government.

If your university’s food science department is doing some exciting and leading-edge research and would like to be considered for a profile in a future Inside Academia column, please send a note to [email protected]. We hope it spurs new ideas and collaborations in the years to come.

Mary Ellen Camire, PhD, CFS, IFT President, 2014–2015
Professor, Univ. of Maine, Orono, Maine
[email protected]