The Critical Role Of Fibre

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By Tim Lougheed

Innovation That Sticks To Your Ribs

You may not want to think about what’s happening in your intestinal tract, but Feral Temelli has staked much of her career on it. As a professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science at the University of Alberta, she has spent the last 15 years examining the complex biochemical mechanisms that our bodies use to manage substances like sugar and cholesterol.

More specifically, she and her departmental colleague Thavar Vasanthan have looked closely at the critical role of fibre. This fundamental nutritional component is often touted as an important part of any healthy diet, with many medical observers bemoaning the very limited amounts of fibre we manage to consume.

The work of these two researchers has led to the creation of an innovative supplement that is now making its way into the marketplace, thanks to Cevena Bioproducts Inc., the Edmonton-based spin-off company founded in 2002 to begin manufacturing this additive on a commercial scale. The product, called Viscofiber®, makes it possible to dramatically enhance the fibre content of a wide variety of foods without compromising their taste or the way in which they are manufactured. In fact, you might not even know that what you are eating is putting more of this important nutrient into your body than ever before.

The function of fibre is relatively straightforward: increasing the viscosity of the material in your intestines, so that a larger proportion of bile can be absorbed and subsequently eliminated through the bowels. Bile acids, which include the cholesterol in our bloodstream, are flushed out and replaced steadily, thereby reducing the possibility of arterial diseases caused by a build-up of this material on blood vessel walls.
High fibre also binds a great deal of water, which slows down the emptying of the stomach. The result leaves you feeling “full” for much longer, so that you are inclined to eat less than you otherwise would do. Temelli points out that this additional virtue has become increasingly welcome now that we regard obesity as being as serious a health hazard as high cholesterol.

But while the value of fibre is well recognized, eating enough of it remains a serious challenge. High fibre food tend to have a reputation for being bland and chewy, so that they compete poorly with the temptations of high-fat, low-fibre alternatives like fast food. Moreover, even a fibre-packed diet might not yield a significant effect on factors such as cholesterol, if the fibre molecules have been compromised during the processing of the food.

Temelli and Vasanthan explored this issue, looking for ways of ensuring that fibre not only makes it from our wish list onto our plates, but has the maximum ability to do some good in the intestines. Their work led them to b-glucan, a long polysaccharide made up of glucose molecules, which is the concentrated essence of soluble dietary fibre.

Derived from oat and barley, b-glucan has been demonstrated to be the key to maintaining cholesterol levels within the most optimal range. But Temelli warns that its application has proven to be elusive.
"If we're targeting the health benefits, we need to make sure we're retaining the physical properties of this molecule so it can provide those benefits," she says, noting that the tidy extraction of intricate b-glucan molecules in the laboratory became difficult to replicate in an industrial setting.

"Because the b-glucan is already solubilized, it's now involved in the high shears of the centrifuges and large scale equipment, so it's easily degraded."
At the same time, enzymes native to these grains also attack the molecule, chopping it up and compromising its ability to increase viscosity. The resulting food products, although packed with fibre, fell short of the researchers' expectations. Temelli and Vasanthan therefore developed an alternative approach.

"b-glucan is naturally located in the cell walls, the endosperm portion of the grain," explains Temelli. "Instead of solubilizing it, we are removing the other components of the cell walls — starches and proteins. What's left behind is the intact, original cell-wall material that's concentrated b-glucan. By washing away and removing these other components without touching the b-glucan, we are retaining the original molecule in its native form."

This accomplishment spawned Cevena, which last year began marketing this high fibre concentrate under the name Viscofiber® to companies in the United States. By that time, the company had been able to secure $6 million in financing, from the Business Development Bank of Canada’s Venture Capital Group, the Golden Opportunities Fund and Foragen Technologies Limited Partnership, both of Saskatoon, and AVAC Ltd., of Calgary.

Their success also earned Temelli and Vasanthan a prestigious ASTech Award in 2005, one of 12 such awards made by this not-for-profit organization, which offers Alberta’s top honours for science and technology in a number of disciplines.

Meanwhile, the researchers continue to look at how this product can be incorporated into large-scale food processing systems. Such activity took a major step forward this summer, with the opening of the University of Alberta's Agri-Food Discovery Place, a $25 million facility that will be dedicated to nutritionally enhanced foods and agriculturally based industrial products.

Temelli describes the site as nothing less than a "dream come true".
"With the barley and oats b-glucan technology development, we did it in little beakers in our current lab," she says. "Going from little beakers to production scale has been a challenging road. Now that we have Agri-Food Discovery Place, we’ll be able to do some of the testing at a small scale pilot level, so we see how these materials actually process and function and behave when you subject it to actual, industrial-type equipment."

Looking ahead, she sees even more interesting prospects emerging from this new research site, which includes a Meat Safety and Processing Research Centre, where meat heading to the marketplace will be analysed in a Level II biocontainment facility using live pathogens and industrial-scale equipment.

For her part, Temelli is leading the Crop Utilization and Enhanced Materials Research Centre, where crops such as cereals, oil seeds and legumes could fractionated into their constituent starches, fibres, lipids and proteins. Although more food products as innovative as Viscofiber® could emerge, the centre is also going to focus on the use of these same crops for industrial products, such as fuel sources or plastics.

The goal, as she puts it, is to free Canadian grain farmers from the harsh cycle of having their crops treated as simple raw commodities, which have seen their price constantly bid down as they compete with farmers from around the world.
"The dream," she says, "is to have their grain end up in hundreds of products simultaneously, maximizing the value and the return on that grain."