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The quest to reduce vitamin deficiency in the world's population is a strong and important issue. People experience effects from these conditions on a daily basis, which is one reason why research needs to be done, to facilitate vitamin intake. Vitamin A and vitamin B12 are incredibly important for humans and are therefore the vitamins we have chosen to research in this project. It is bacteria that produce vitamin B12. In spite of this, vitamin B12 is available in several varieties. There are variants that humans can digest, and there are variants we cannot digest. Our bodies can break down, use, and store the variants produced by bacteria living in animals. A bacteria capable of producing biodegradable vitamin B12 without living in an animal could help make this vitamin available in non-animal products.
Examples of these non-animal products could be foods that can be fermented. This is our idea with this research and we have chosen to focus on the fermented sourdough. We have chosen a lactic acid bacteria that is already found in many sourdough starters. This is due to the responsibility that the bacteria needs to be safe to eat, which this lactic acid bacteria already is. This bacteria already produced the variant of vitamin B12 that we cannot break down, so by changing the metabolism we were able to make it produce the bioactive vitamin B12 that we can break down and absorb. We chose to do so because it increased the likelihood that the bacteria is safe for humans, which is very important because the product is ultimately meant to be eaten.
Another measure to ensure for those people who would be ingesting b12 via bread baked with our sourdough starter is to add a biomarker. We chose to design a biomarker in the form of yeast - which is also already present in sourdoughs naturally. This yeast produces vitamin A if vitamin B12 is present. Vitamin A itself will be orange, which means that the person who will eat the bread can see that there is both vitamin A and B12 in the bread.
It is always important, especially in research that affects human health, to know what impact the product will have. To ensure this, we contacted researchers from Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Uppsala University, Chalmers University of Technology and a food service manager to discuss and improve the execution during the course of the research.
Emma Ellegård, Food Service Manager
Lars Ellegård, Senior Consultant at Clinical Nutrition, Sahlgrenska University Hospital
Ingela Marklinder, Professor, Uppsala University
Rikard Landberg, Professor, Chalmers University of Technology
We interviewed Ingela Marklinder who is a professor at Uppsala University, where she teaches subjects such as food microbiology, food science, and health communication. Her research primarily focuses on health and its relation to food safety and consumer behavior. For us, it is important to know as much as possible about the product we design, and when it comes to sourdough, Ingela Marklinder is an expert. Ingela explained the importance of choosing flour and environmental conditions for sourdough to ensure that the dough is as good as possible. We also learned the importance of producing our product as just a sourdough starter and not as a sourdough, which was the idea from the beginning. The important thing here is that as we had thought, that everyone could have a sourdough at home and have their own vitamin factory in the fridge that you can share with your friends is not safe as the bacteria and yeast would have a great opportunity to mutate and change. Being consistent and producing a sourdough starter that can then be bought by bakeries or consumers who know that the function of the bacteria and yeast could disappear after time is very important and therefore continuously buy new. It is only if a factory ensures that the sourdough start works as it should by having controlled bacteria and yeast cultures that we can take responsibility for the product without contributing to a false sense of security among consumers. Such false security could have contributed to the fact that the person who eats the bread just to get the vitamins is cheated and it would not have been ethically right. This is very important to us and the reason why we improved the product from being a sourdough to a sourdough starter.
We interviewed Lars Ellegård, a Senior Consultant at Clinical Nutrition at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, to discuss who is affected by vitamin deficiency, at what stage the vitamin deficiency can be prevented and his professional opinion regarding the need for this type of product. Through conversations with him, it became clear to us that our research is very important for those who do not yet have a vitamin deficiency, as well as those who already do because of their diet, which can depend on various factors such as availability, personal choices, money and religion. For us, it became important to focus on the sourdough starter being accessible to everyone without costing a lot of money, which is an advantage as sourdough starters are a very environmentally sustainable product. Lars Ellegård also made it clear to us that vitamin A is a very important vitamin to make available in many parts of the world and that the flour to be used for the sourdough should be carefully selected to improve the product as much as possible.
We interviewed the food service manager to discuss the transition from animal products to a green diet that incorporates nutrients from bacteria, among other things. Our exploration encompasses how children can acquire the necessary vitamins from a vegetarian school meal, as well as how factors like cost and nutrition influence these decisions. It is very important that the environmental regulations that need to be considered around the world are taken seriously. We talked about the green shift and the development of products that help us to reduce the environmental impact accordingly. Producing sustainable products that are healthy to eat is very important and essential for the transition to take place. Emma highlighted the importance of eating less meat and the importance of planning nutritious meals.
In our interview with Professor Rikard Landberg, we delved into the interplay between diet, health, and the future of food. Dr. Landberg leads a team of 15-20 experts, ranging from dietitians to mathematicians, in studying the profound impact of diets, especially plant-based diets on health. This health aspect is more associated with cardiovascular diseases, type II diabetes, and obesity. Notably, their focus sharpens on the pivotal role of high-fibre foods in appetite regulation and long-term weight management. On the other hand, they are working on measuring the diets in an objective way, where his group is using nutritional metabolomics to analyse small molecules. The idea here is to study the regulations between these molecules and disease risks, both to understand and predict them in large-scale studies. Their research also extends to personalised nutrition, using omics data to tailor plant-based diets according to metabolomics and gut microbiome data.