Solutions for Safe and Healthier Foods

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	Health for People and Pets
	Improving Everyday Life
	Safe and Healthier Foods
	Cleaner Manufacturing and Environmental Challenges
	Food Production
	Biodefense and Public Safety
	What's Next

As obesity rates climb to epidemic levels, biotechnology is helping to create a new generation of healthier oils from soybeans, canola and sunflowers. These oils are free of the trans fats that can raise cholesterol and contribute to heart disease.

Other biotechnology products would improve nutritional content. One such product, “golden rice,” would provide vitamin A to millions of people in developing countries who suffer from a deficiency of this vitamin, which is critical for eyesight and anemia prevention. This is only one example of several fortified foods now in development.

Hundreds of millions of Africans rely on sorghum, one of the few crops that grow in arid conditions. It's used to make cakes, beer and porridge as well as livestock feed. With grants from U.S. groups, African scientists are working to make sorghum more easily digestible by humans and to increase its levels of several key nutitional elements, including zinc, iron, vitamin A, amino acids and protein.

In some cases, biotech can improve a food by removing an allergen. An estimated 5.4 to 7 million Americans are allergic to such common foods as peanuts, shellfish, milk, soy, wheat and eggs. Children with food allergies are particularly vulnerable to anaphylactic shock, which results in about 125 deaths each year in the United States. Biotechnology scientists are working to isolate the specific proteins that trigger allergic reactions and modify the foods so as to eliminate the health risk.

Biotechnology can also help make meats safer through innovations in animal health. More then 100 animal biotech products are helping to assure animals are healthy when they leave the farm for processing.

To make animal products even safer in the future, biotech researchers are developing products to prevent animals from harboring the E. coli O157:H7 bacteria that cause more than 73,000 cases of illness each year in the United States. Biotech researchers and companies are also developing DNA-based animal identification systems to quickly track future outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) and quickly remove affected meat from grocery stores. Moreover, Korean researchers have cloned cattle that are not susceptible to BSE ó pointing the way toward a BSE-free future.

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