Manipulating existing foods and designing new foods can help improve Americans growth and productivity and reduce their susceptibility to disease. Better understanding of essential and non-essential compounds within foods, including their content in the food supply, bioavailability, and roles and interactions in nutrition, will provide a basis for developing foods tailored to individual needs. Creating novel foods using modified constituents, such as fat substitutes, offers additional means for developing and using agricultural products. Research is needed, however, to determine the maximum quantity of modified dietary constituents that can be safely eaten and to evaluate the processes used to develop novel foods. New technologies applied to agricultural products offer unprecedented opportunities to respond to consumer demands for healthy diets.
Objectives Develop data for food design.
Determine the bioavailability, nutrient interactions, and the impact of food processing to develop the data base needed to design novel foods. Develop new processing methods. Develop new production and processing technologies to incorporate beneficial constituents and to reduce adverse constituents in foods. Assess new foods. Determine the safety, acceptability, efficacy, and nutritional consequences of new and novel foods as they are developed.