"processed foods" news and stories

Food manufacturers are always looking for ways to make their foods appear more healthy, or to appeal to certain demographics. Gum Technology has a new egg replacement blend that they're hoping will catch on with bakeries.

The Coyote Brand Baker's 2 Egg Replacer is made with a blend is made from an "all natural" blend of sugarcane fiber, xanthan gum and guar gum. It is used at 20 percent of the weight of the egg removed, by adding it to water to make up the remaining 80 percent of egg weight. Gum Technology thinks that this product will be a great opportunity for vegan baking, as well as appeal to those with egg allergies.

On a similar note, there's another development in the works that may also have huge implications on the food industry. Seagreens, a Norwegian company, and researchers at Sheffield Hallam University are working on the viability of using seaweed granules to replace salt in processed food. The granules are made from cold water brown seaweed from the coastline of Norway. They're testing what effects the seaweed granules have on the quality and shelf life of products in which the salt has been replaced.

With news agencies now saying that a major source of salt in daily diets is bread, carb-laden loaves could once again come under fire from nutrition-fanatics. Even though the headlines blame bread, more than 75 percent of all the salt in people’s diets come from processed foods, only a small portion of which are breads. Salt is necessary in bread making, not only for flavor, but because it interacts with the yeast, retarding its growth and producing a better-textured, tastier loaf. One teaspoon of salt weighs just over 2 grams, and organizations like the British government recommend a maximum of 6 grams of salt a day. If a loaf of homemade or non-preprocessed bread has one to three tablespoons of salt in it, there is nothing to worry about unless you are eating multiple loaves of bread on a daily basis.

Some salt is necessary in the diet, serving functions like regulating fluid levels in the body. Do yourself a favor and cut back on the deli meats, don’t just cut back on bread.

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