The traditional English Breakfast has always been eggs, sausages, bacon, toast and maybe mushrooms or other additions.

A recent study has found that this high protein breakfast is particularly good for women and reduces the amount of food eaten later in the day. Maybe this is a case of the research finally confirming what has obviously been known for years. It also shows what has long been stated that it is not good to miss or skip breakfast as it does influence appetite for the rest of the day.

“Acute Satiety Effects of Sausage/Egg-based Convenience Breakfast Meals in Premenopausal Women”, is the name of the research and it was presented at The Obesity Society’s annual scientific meeting in Atlanta on 14 November 2013. It was a joint effort by Biofortis Clinical Research, Chicago, a division of Merieux NutriSciences, and the University of Missouri’s Department of Exercise Physiology and Nutrition, Columbia

The research involved presenting each of the 18-55 year old women with a bowl of different types of breakfast food, each containing approximately 300 calories. The egg and meat breakfasts contained up to 39 grams of protein.

Each participant was given a questionnaire before breakfast and then at 30 minute intervals until lunch. The questions related to appetite, including fullness, feeling of hunger and desire to eat. At lunch tortellini and tomato based sauce was served and the participants were allowed to eat until comfortably full.

Those that had eaten the high protein breakfast had a lower appetite and ate less of the lunch than those that hadn’t or had not eaten any breakfast at all.

Kevin C. Maki, Principal Investigator of the study and a research scientist with Biofortis Clinical Research said; “Eating a breakfast rich in protein significantly improves appetite control and may help women to avoid overeating later in the day.”

There is a growth in the quick breakfast market with several drinkable breakfasts now available on our supermarket shelves. The findings of this research will probably change the formulations of these and any other brands wanting to come into this market.

It should also be of great interest to the diet industry, as it shows that breakfast should include a reasonable amount of protein to help achieve the diet goals and that skipping that meal is something that should not be encouraged.

So from now on, we probably shouldn’t feel guilty about a small serve of a traditional English Breakfast.

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams, The Green Food Safety Coach.

Here is the media release by the Food Safety Information Council about this year’s theme for Australian Food Safety Week. Some of the results are frightening.

A national Newspoll Survey, commissioned by the Food Safety Information Council for Australian Food Safety Week, shows too few Australian adults are taking notice of vital food safety advice on food labels and, with summer ahead, are taking risks by not using insulated bags or coolers to transport refrigerated food.

Dr Michael Eyles, Council Chair, said that it was disturbing to find only just over half (55%) of those surveyed always read and comply with ‘use by’ dates and less than half (45%) always read and comply with ‘best before’ dates.

“Frightening is not too strong a word to describe other results, including that only a third (33%) of people always read and comply with storage instructions and a meager 14% always read and comply with cooking instructions,” Dr Eyles elaborated.

“Consumers are obviously not taking advantage of the wealth of readily available information on labels which are intended to make our food safer and shopping decisions easier. For example ask yourself ‘Will I eat all of this by the ‘use by’ date?’ – ‘Do I have room in the fridge/freezer?’ – ‘Do I really want to cook this for that long’?

“When shopping, choose products you know you will consume or freeze within the ‘use by’ time. Never buy products after the ‘use by’ date. In fact it’s illegal to sell such food due to the risk of food poisoning.

“Food past the ’best before’ date is legal to sell and is often on special as this date refers to quality not safety − the biscuits may have lost their crunch, but won’t cause food poisoning.

“Storage instructions have a significant influence on the safety of perishable food, and can negate ‘use by’ and ‘best before’ dates as these depend on food being refrigerated or otherwise stored properly. ‘Refrigerate after opening’, ‘keep frozen’ or ‘refrigerate under 4°C’ must be followed or food poisoning bacteria will grow quickly.

“Don’t rely on how you stored food in the past. Products change with food trends, and many are now lower in salt and sugar than in the past. Food manufacturers know the recipe, the manufacturing process, and other details that indicate how long a product will last and how to store and cook it safely. “Read the advice on the label and you may find that the products you used to keep open in the cupboard now need to be refrigerated.”

Dr Eyles said despite cooking instructions being hugely important “an astounding 86% of those surveyed didn’t always read and comply with these instructions which is far too high and creates a serious food poisoning risk, especially for poultry, minced or cubed meats, or egg products.

“Following the manufacturer’s advice on temperature, cooking time, stirring and resting time is essential to ensure the food is safely cooked through and delicious,” he said.

On an optimistic note, the Council’s Newspoll survey did show that more than 8 in 10 (83%) people say the last time they bought refrigerated food it took less than 30 minutes to get the food from the store to the home fridge with nearly everyone else getting the food home in under an hour.

“This was a great result, and with the hot weather now for most of the country the 3 in 10 survey respondents (25% in capital cities versus 37% in regional Australia) saying they used an insulated bag or cooler to take food home are the smart ones, and hopefully others will follow their lead.

“Refrigerated food can warm quickly into the temperature danger zone (5°-65°C) where food poisoning bacteria can grow − this is especially risky for foods that won’t be cooked again such as sliced deli meats, pate, prepared salads, cut fruits and soft cheeses.

“Also, pick up refrigerated and frozen food last when shopping and always take an insulated bag or cooler with you to the shops,” Dr Eyles concluded.

The Newspoll survey, commissioned by the Council, was conducted by telephone in October 2013 among a representative sample of n=1201 people, aged 18+ nationally.

Find out more about shopping food safety

CONTACT: Juliana Madden, Executive Officer: 0407 626 688

AUSTRALIAN FOOD SAFETY WEEK is the major activity of the Food Safety Information Council which aims to address the estimated 5.4 million cases of food borne illness in Australia each year.

Food poisoning results, on average, in 120 deaths, 1.2 million visits to doctors, 300,000 prescriptions for antibiotics, and 2.1 million days of lost work each year. The estimated annual cost of food poisoning in Australia is $1.25 billion.

The Food Safety Information Council is Australia’s leading disseminator of consumer-targeted food safety information. It is a non-profit entity supported by the Australian Department of Health and Ageing, state and territory health and food safety agencies, local government, and leading professional, industry and community organisations.

For some beer is their drink of choice at meals, and for others, it is wine. There are probably as many different types of beers out there as there are pubs to serve them. There are the huge commercial varieties and then there are the smaller boutique and gourmet ales. There are also some that people just make at home. There are pilseners, ales, stouts and other varieties.

Beer is like cheese and many other foods that have been around for millennia, there are many types, flavours and styles. So which is which and where do you get them?

To help those that are already beer lovers expand their pallet and experience, a new beer guide has been delivered to us. The Australian and New Zealand Beer Buyers Guide has arrived. It will make life infinitely easier for the beer drinker, as well as the retailers hoping to develop their beer market.

The book has nine chapters and starts with the basics about how beer is actually made. This lays the foundation for the rest of the Guide, which has been contributed to by some of the most well known beer aficionados in Australia.

The Guide then goes into how to taste beer and then what to look for when buying it as well as the glassware to serve it. Interestingly different serving temperatures are recommended for different beer styles to get the best flavour and texture.

Beers have a best before date and will lose quality quickly after that, so this is highlighted in the Guide. So storage temperature and handling are important as well.

It is a useful Guide and well worth having a look at. If beer is your thing, then this would be worth putting on the Christmas present list as it will help develop your beer knowledge and taste. Much of the information it contains has traditionally only been available in trade publications, so now it is accessible by the public.

The book is produced by the publishers of Beer And Brewer Magazine.

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams – The Green Food Safety Coach

Two new products have recently been released for sale. One of them is a meat pie with a mashed pumpkin top and the other is two ice creams called “guts” and snot”. My nephew (11 yo) tried “guts” and said it is the best ice cream he has ever had. It was green ice on the outside and red ice cream with popping candy inside – just perfect for boys of that age.

What do these products have in common? It is that time of the year when people dress as ghosts, witches and talk about “trick or treat”. Yes, it has recently been Halloween. Although not a traditional Australian holiday, it is now a feature this time of year, with parties, festivals and new tailored food products.

These new food products will not be around for long, they are intended to boosts sales due to the link to Halloween. It is a technique that is regularly used by the big fast food (quick serve) operators to keep people coming in. Whether it be a new type of burger or a super deal or a new product on the menu board for “a limited time”, it is all about keeping and improving sales.

With Christmas rapidly approaching, there will be an influx across the food industry of festive related foods to bring in people and keep them. The other day, I saw an ad on TV for a new type of Christmas pudding with a whole candied orange inside that is only available exclusively at one supermarket. This type of product will definitely not be the only Christmas related thing we will see in the next six weeks.

There are food staples and we will always buy them, but manufacturers know that to get new customers and keep current ones, there is a need to always bring out something new. It may only be a modification to a flavour like making an old favourite burger into an Hawaiian version with pineapple added, or tomato sauce flavoured crisps, or something brand new like the “snot” or guts” ice creams.

It is our culture that determines a lot of this product development, like Australia Day, or Christmas or our growing interest in Halloween. Look at the number of ads on TV and in the supermarket and new products that contain lamb in January.

It is worth noting that the two new ice creams probably started development up to three years ago. Product development is not a quick process and something like 99 ideas out of 100 are killed before the final product makes it to the market.

Finding that product that hits the sweet spot, and generates massive long term sales, is the aim of all product development and marketing, and it is our culture that helps determine what that product will be.

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams – The Green Food Safety Coach

My father had an acquired brain injury due to an infection, one of the side effects of this was that he would always be wanting to eat. He would hide food and then find it later to eat. If food was there, especially sweet food, he would just want to keep eating. We were amazed that he could find room, so had to keep a close eye on him to stop him from putting on weight. He was not alone in having this sort of issue and in aged care centres across the country, staff have to carefully monitor their residents to ensure they do not put on weight or eat someone else’s food.

A recent study has shown that there is a set of neurons within the brain that are the off switch for appetite. In my father’s case, and those like him, these neurons have been damaged or destroyed and therefore the off switch does not work. So we have to do it for them.

The study was published in the journal Nature on 13 October 2013, was done by scientists at the University of Washington, using genetic engineering.

Mice were used in the study to determine that nerves in the gut send messages through to specific neurons containing calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) and the appetite is suppressed.

These neurons are found in the region called the parabrachial nucleus, which is in the front of the brain.

Richard Palmiter, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, said; “These results demonstrate that activation of the CGRP-expressing neurons regulates appetite. This is a nice example of how the brain responds to unfavourable conditions in the body, such as nausea caused by food poisoning.”

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams – The Green Food Safety Coach

I was recently reading an article in Food Australia which discussed how the words we use everyday may not mean the same thing to everyone.

The word “milk” would represent a specific thing in the minds of most people born in Australia, but is likely to mean something entirely different to those born overseas. Milk in this country is assumed by most to be the product that occurs from milking a cow and is white. Now is that milk or is it the stuff that comes out of the plastic bottles from the supermarket that has been heated, cooled and pressured?

I grew up on a farm and was fortunate enough to be able to drink milk straight from the cow, but there are people in this country who actually have no idea that this is where milk comes from.

Milk is just an example, but when we stop and think about it, this word will mean different things to different people. To someone from Asia, milk may actually be the white liquid produced from squeezing soy beans and for others it will be what results when camels are milked.

This also applies to many of the foods we eat, so we have to be very careful what we call our foods and how we label them.

Although it is not a food, a brand new perfume highlights this perfectly. This new perfume is called Si and has a beautiful as on the TV with Cate Blanchet. This word means Yes in Spanish. It seems like a terrific name for a new perfume from a very large perfume company.

The problem is that this word, when pronounced a specific way, can mean “death” in Mandarin.

So this huge company has effective set this product up to not be purchased by a large percentage of the world female population. All because it did not make sure that the words used were clearly understood by all. That is just bad business.

So when using words to describe a food or even a process, ensure that they are easily understood by those you are talking with, regardless of whether it is on a food label or it communicating with your staff or other stakeholders.

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams – The Green Food Safety Coach

With Australian Food Safety Week 2013 only weeks away, it is interesting to see that in recent research, more than half of the shoppers surveyed consider food safety to be important when shopping.

This year’s theme is about shopping and food safety, so this result is of particular interest to the supermarkets.

However the results show that it is generally only 57 percent of shoppers who consider food safety to be the most important factor when choosing a supermarket to use. The question that really needs to be asked is why the other 43 percent of people don’t?

The other issues that were considered important were; proximity, value, trading hours, quality and range, usable / clean trolleys, weekly specials and everything in one place.

Even though the large chains are now offering petrol discounts to bring in customers, the research found that only around 25 percent of the shoppers over 14 years old thought this was important enough to help determine where they shopped.

The research also found that the results were different depending upon which supermarket was involved, with both Coles and Woolworths shoppers having a higher food safety expectation. Aldi rated highly with price and value and IGA was primarily about convenience. This will obviously help set the growth strategies for each of these businesses.

The research was done by Roy Morgan research.

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams – The Green Food Safety Coach

The Allergen Bureau developed an allergen assessment and labelling tool quite a few years ago and it has since been reviewed into it’s second version. The tool is called VITAL (Voluntary Incidental Trace Allergen Labelling) and sets a method to be used to determine the levels of the recognised food allergens in a product and then includes a system for labelling of those foods.

The revision was based on the results from a recent international study, which has developed reference doses of 11 recognised food allergens, based on the results of 55 clinical food challenge studies.

According to Allergy and Anaphylaxis Australia, in Australia, food allergies affect 10 per cent of infants, 4-8 per cent of children aged between 5 and 13 years, and about 2 per cent of people over 13. Most allergies in children disappear over time.

Hen’s egg, cow’s milk, peanuts and tree nuts are the most common triggers for food allergy. Seafood, sesame, soy, fish and wheat are the less common triggers. Life-long allergies are usually from peanuts, tree nuts, seeds and seafood.

Interestingly, the international study was originally implemented as a result of the original VITAL system.

The study was done as a joint project by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) in Australia, the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program (FARRP) of the University of Nebraska in the US, TNO in the Netherlands and Unilever in the UK

There are some businesses in Australia that already utilising VITAL as their tool for allergen assessment and labelling. As a result of this recent study, the call has now gone out to have utilisation of this, now well recognised, dose based system into the Food Standards Code, and other world legislation, as the method for labelling of all allergen containing foods.

Professor Katie Allen, lead author of the study and Director of Population Health at MCRI, said; “Establishing a reliable labelling system that is informed by evidence and is practical to use will not only enhance the safety and credibility of precautionary labelling but also enable manufactures to minimise its overuse through a formal risk assessment tool. This in turn will provide increased consumer confidence in their legitimacy and enable allergic consumers to eat a wider variety of food with safety and confidence. The majority of the allergic population would have access to a wider variety of foods if the reference dose concept were adopted by the food industry and used to guide labelling decisions.”

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams – The Green Food Safety Coach

Although there are some issues with the measure of Body Mass Index (BMI), it is the commonly accepted method for determining if someone is overweight or obese. It is a measurement of a person’s weight in kilograms divided by their height in metres.

If the result is less than 18.5, the person can be considered to be underweight, in other words they are not carrying enough weight on their frame. The normal weight range is between 18.5 and 24.9. If a person is possibly overweight they will be in the range of 25 to 29.9. Those who are considered obese have a BMI of 30 or more.

It is well recognised that missing breakfast will result in a lower metabolism as it has not been stimulated at the start of the day. This has been shown to contribute to increasing weight. Therefore people who miss breakfast regularly may have a higher BMI.

S recent study in Finland has shown that establishing and maintaining a regular eating pattern will encourage a person’s metabolise to function properly and assist in reducing obesity. The study focussed on adolescents and had more than 4000 participants.

It was found in the study, that having five regular meals a day, even for those who are predisposed to obesity, will not increase BMI in those taking part. The five meals were; breakfast, snack, lunch, snack and dinner.

The study followed the male and female participants from pregnancy to16 years old, and found that the increased food intake over the years did not result in a higher BMI.

The study results have been published in various journals, including; International Journal of Obesity, the International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Disesase, and PLOS One.

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams – The Green Food Safety Coach

So how do you feel about eating food that has been made just for you by a printer?

NASA has recently funded a study in Texas in the USA to investigate the potential of specially developed printers that will make food to recipes specifically set up for individuals.

There are already 3D printers being used for art and manufacturing, so this is really just a natural progression.

NASA is hoping that a 3D printer can be developed with the supporting materials to supply astronauts with their dietary intake on long space travels in the not too distant future.

Chocolate printing is already being done by a company called Choc Edge and the printer is now available for around £3000.

The current study is working on printing a pizza. The machine will make the base first and then a tomato sauce will be added and finally a layer of suitable protein. This protein may not be from traditional sources, but rather insects, and algae. This, in itself, will make people look carefully at this food.

It is adventurous and unusual, but work such as this is essential to ensure food security into the future. This is particularly important, as the earth’s human population continues to increase and our food supply is likely to not meet those demands.

This article has been written by Rachelle Williams – The Green Food Safety Coach