- [Female Robotic Voice] Tree, two, one [electrostatic music plays] - [Male Robotic Voice] Research innovate.

[upbeat music plays] - [Female Robotic Voice] Educate.

[upbeat music plays] This is RTP.

[upbeat music plays] This is RTP 180.

[upbeat music plays] - Good evening, everybody.

And welcome to the frontier on the campus of beautiful Research Triangle Park for RTP 180.

How's everybody out there doing this evening?

[audience cheering] Woo is the correct answer.

I appreciate that.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are here at the region's only free co-working space for RTP 180 presented by RTI International.

I am your MC Wade Minter for RTP 180.

Our subject is Food Science, which if I am not to be mistaken is the science of food.

Got my education in Southern Virginia y'all.

Now that's me, feel free to follow me on Twitter.

[whispering] Don't follow me on Twitter.

I wouldn't.

But I will be your MC for today.

We have a great lineup of food science experts for you.

Now, RTI international.

They're the folks who make this happen.

So if you see somebody from RTI International smile with them and shake their hand, give them 20 bucks, I don't know.

But they are the ones who have been bringing this to you for almost a decade now.

So if you are here from RTI International, which I think someone might be based on the reaction, give them a hand 'cause they make it possible for us to bring this to you.

We're also streaming live on PBS NC.

So you can check that out if you're not here and if you're not here, I don't know how you would hear me tell you to check it out, but that's a paradox and we just destroy the universe.

Also, we do this every month, except for December on the third Thursday, this month, the third Thursday happens to fall on Yom Kippur.

So for those who are observing that holiday, we ask that you have an easy and meaningful fast, and we will see you next month.

Now, normally we have five speakers, but five's too many.

So we got four this month.

So the four speakers will speak for approximately five minutes.

And after that comes the most important part where there is approximately five minutes of Q&A from you, our audience, if it is not Q&A from your audience, it's awkward silence.

And nobody likes that.

So as you're listening to our speakers talk about their areas of expertise.

Please be thinking of questions, 'cause if you don't think of questions, that means I have to think of questions and my questions are inane, they're much better coming from you.

Also from the audience, you may notice that our speakers up here on a fashion runway are likely to be unmasked.

We are in appropriate distance for performers as per the city of Durham's mask ordinance.

For those of you in the audience, if you're not actively eating or drinking, we ask that you respect the city of Durham's mask ordinance by keeping your mask on.

Actively eating or drinking doesn't mean that you've thought about food today.

It means that there's stuff going actively into your mouth.

So please do that so we can all stay safe and hopefully at some point before I die, get back to normal.

All right, you can connect with us during the show.

You can tweet at us.

You can hashtag at us, all that sort of stuff, and you can also come visit the regions only free co-working space right here.

That's what it normally looks like when we are all set up, stop by, socially distance and co-work here.

We also have events that happen outside.

We have events that happened in the lobby.

We have events all over the place, including an out of office happy hour event on the first, second and fourth Thursdays of the month.

You can come by here in the evening, grab a beer or do some networking.

Get out of your house 'cause I know I need to get out of my house.

Third Thursday, you'll be here with us.

So there's, it's kind of a happy hour.

In fact, some could consider it a happier hour.

I'm done enough talking.

We need to get this show on the road, ladies and gentlemen.

So, Food Science is the topic and we've got four speakers.

And introducing first, our first speaker of the evening, as I switch my paper here.

She is a passionate food scientist and assistant professor at the Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences at North Carolina State University.

Please welcome to the stage Dr. Deepti Salvi.

[audience cheering and clapping] - Thank you.

Thank you, everyone.

So today I'm gonna talk about food processing, but before talking about food processing, let me talk about what food science is and what food scientists do.

So every time I introduce myself and tell anyone that I'm a food scientist, they always confuse me by either being chef or nutritionist.

But that's not what food scientists do.

What food scientists do is they use principles of chemistry, biology, and engineering, to better understand food processes and improve the food products for public.

So what is food processing?

In food processing, we convert raw materials like fresh produce, grains, legumes, meat, poultry, and egg, to a final product, which is shelf stable, more nutritious, and is microbiologically safe for you using different processing operations, such as, here you can see canning, extrusion or freezing.

So why do we process food?

We process food to make food safe.

We process food to make it available and affordable, to make it nutritious and convenient, to make it increase shelf life, to tailor for specific needs, such as lactose free or gluten free, to change flavor and texture of the food, as well as reduced food waste.

So how do we process food?

You know, other than biochemical processes like fermentation, mainly we either add heat to the food or cook or remove heat or freeze the food.

And most of you are fermented...

Most of you are familiar with food which have added heat into it.

For example, pasteurized milk, juices, fried chips, dried fruits and vegetables.

So mostly we use heat to process our food, but there is a problem with the heat, excess heat.

Heat is an excellent agent to kill pathogens or bad bacteria, but they also, heat also deteriorate nutrients, flavor, as well as quality.

So with that in mind, in my lab, we work on agents other than heat to process food, different agents, such as very, very high pressure, cold plasma, and UV light.

And next few slides, I'll explain you what those agents are.

So let's look at high pressure processing, imagine a dime and on which there are three African elephant standing on top of it weighing 15 tons total.

So the dime goes through... What pressure dime goes through, that's how much pressure the food goes through.

And don't worry, we don't make your food... Make elephants to stand on your food.

Instead we use [inaudible] like this, where we use, we transmit the pressure using water.

So what that extreme high pressure does to food is it inactivates bacteria as well as some enzymes to make food safe for you while keeping it fresh, because it's not heat treated, just pressure is use.

It remains high quality food and has longer shelf life without adding any preservative.

So over 30 years of research, bioscientists worldwide resulted into a lot of products that are currently available in market, which are high pressure processed.

For example, you can see the guacamole products, which have longer shelf life without any preservatives, some juices which taste like freshly squeezed juices, but they are cold pasteurized or high pressure processed, shellfish in which you can take out the meat, raw meat, without cooking it, but it is safe for you.

And some souped products which have no preservative, but higher...

Raw souped product, which have no preservative, but higher shelf life.

And more recently, there is high pressure processed raw milk, which is approved in Australia and New Zealand.

So other than pressure, we also use cold plasma to process food.

So plasma is the fourth state of matter, solid, liquid, gas.

And when you apply more energy to gas, it converts into partially ionized gas, which is called plasma.

We all are familiar with plasma.

We have seen in Northern lights, in lightning or stars, but the plasma that we use in our lab is at atmospheric pressure and at room temperature.

We use that plasma as water free chemical residue free technology to sanitize food products, as well as food contact surfaces.

We also are looking into in-package plasma applications for food safety.

Next, we also use UV light or ultra violet radiations of certain wavelength, which have bactericidal properties.

We use them to make different food products, such as juices or eggs, microbiologically safe, and improve the shelf life while keeping the fresh qualities.

And also it has shown to improve some nutrition in some of the products.

So imagine the word without food processing, if food processing was not there, there won't be abundant food in supermarket.

There there will be food safety risks, the food that you eat will get you sick.

It will not be convenient.

There won't be enough nutrition and the food will be expensive.

So next time, when you are eating your breakfast cereals, which has same crunch, every time you eat or drinking orange juice, which has fresh like sensory qualities, but it doesn't get you sick.

Think about food scientists who are working on different processing technologies to make your food safe, nutritious, fresh, convenient, and high quality.

Thank you.

[audience clapping] - Great, great stuff about processing food.

When I went to Del Taco in LA over the summer, I asked them for free shavacado and they had no idea what I was talking about.

All right.

Ladies and gentlemen get your questions in.

Raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question about food processing and I will bring the mic to you.

Also, and I see you right there.

So I'm not gonna forget about you.

Everyone who asks a question tonight will receive a free vile of RTP 180 Boxyard branded sunblock.

- [Audience] Ooh!

- And if you could see my arms, you'll know I need it.

All right, ladies and gentlemen our first question of the evening coming from right back here.

- Are there labeling rules for the high pressure processing, or how can you know if that was done that way or some other way?

- Yeah.

So usually, when you see this product in the market, you don't have to mention how they were processed, but you know, if you look carefully at the back of the label, it will say high pressure process, or it will say never heat treated, something like that.

So there is no requirement to label it.

- [Wade Minter] It's all a mystery.

All right, next question coming from over here.

- Hello.

Thank you.

I really enjoyed the presentation.

I hate to ask this, but it seems like every diet and every new thing is saying, "Avoid food processing at all costs."

And I didn't see anything compelling to me of why food processing helps us rather than potentially hurts us with all the things that are added to food.

I know that you didn't go into additives, but can you talk a little bit about why food processing... Because they say food can be more nutritious without it.

And yet one of your slides mentioned nutrition.

So I think you know what I'm trying to say.

Thank you.

Thank you.

- [laughs] Yeah.

Thank you for that question.

I think that is a very important question you know, because a lot of people will say food processing is bad, and I'm tired of listening to that, but you know, let me tell you, we need to process food to increase the digestibility.

We process all the food.

Meat, we cannot eat raw, we need to cook it.

So even when you cook it, it's processing.

Right?

As also, you know, when I talk about nutrition, one thing is some of the nutrients become more bioavailable when you cook, and the way you cook also affects.

Like, for example, that high pressure process product, they have like high pressure process... You know, guacamole has more bioavailability of certain nutrients.

So, you know, things like that, that improve.

Other thing is when I talk about processing and like your milk added vitamin D. So some of these things are taken care while processing, you know, long, long time back we used to have a lot of nutrient deficiency related diseases.

After food processing, those diseases are reduced because most of the micronutrients are...

The nutrients are added in the food.

When people say food processing is bad, it's probably not what they're trying to say.

They're trying to say, you need to look at the ingredient list and what has been added in it.

And that's where my lab works in minimal processing where we don't have the add any preservatives or anything else that is bad for you.

So I think people get always confused with processing versus what's in that food.

So, but processing is important.

We cannot eat unprocessed food.

- Excellent answer.

Next question coming from right back here.

[murmurs] - Thank you.

[murmurs] - [Dr. Deepti Salvi] I cannot hear it.

- [Wade] The question is about membrane processing.

- Okay, yeah.

So I do not have a lot of experience in membrane processing, but it is one of the non-thermal process where you can use it for separation of some of the things, but I'm not an expert in that area.

Thank you.

- [Wade] All right.

We have one more question over here on the right, as I attempt to figure out how technology works.

I'm running, I'm running.

All right.

You had a question here.

- [Male With Deep Voice] I do.

Hey, thanks so much for a great talk.

So I've worked in microbiology for a while and every once in a while you run into bugs that are really resistant to certain methods of sterilization.

Like we have a bleach resistant and ethanol resistant.

Are there any bugs that are particularly resistant to high pressure?

- Yeah.

So with the high pressure, you can kill a vegetative bacteria, but spores, it's difficult to kill spores.

So in case if you want to use high pressure to sterilize something, you need to use heat along with that, but lower amount of heat.

So spores is something that is very difficult to kill using high pressure processing, but vegetative bacterias can be.

And also some bacteria can also survive.

So you have some probiotic, you know, you can choose the processing conditions such that you don't kill the probiotic bacteria, something like that.

So you have to do in the process depending on the bacteria, but one of the limitation is spores cannot be inactivated just with high pressure.

- [Male With Deep Voice] Thank you.

- Much like Egon Spengler, I collect molds, spores, and fungus.

All right.

Last question, coming from right back here.

- Hi, thank you for the presentation.

Could you recommend a good resource that would put together the information on right food processing for different types.

Like for example, [murmurs].

- I can't really hear.

[women conversing quietly] - Is there packages for our online audiences?

Is there a good resource for different types of foods in the appropriate type of processing to those foods?

- Oh, okay.

So I think it really...

There is a lot of literature available on different processing methods and bioavailability, for example, when...

If you eat carrot raw versus slightly steamed, you know, you get more bioavailability of the nutrients in it.

So there are, there is literature, but that I might have to look for some review articles or something where you can find all this information together, but there is literature available on that.

- All right, ladies and gentlemen, big hand for Dr. Deepti Salvi.

[audience clapping] Telling y'all, I'm like Typhoid Mary for technology.

I touch it at a breaks.

[audience laughs] Really shouldn't have gone into technology as a career.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, Our second speaker of the evening, he grew up right here in the Triangle area, started bartending 12 years ago.

And now he's the beverage director at Lauren's Barbecue and Lagoon Bar right over there at Boxyard RTP.

Please welcome to the stage, Zach Thomas.

[audience clapping] - Hello.

My name is Zach and I'll be your server.

I mean, speaker today.

And I'm really sorry if you came here to see my chin.

[audience laughing] Thanks Wade for the wonderful introduction, my man.

I've worked at a bunch of places around the Triangle and fortunately enough, I've been able to pick up a few techniques and different tactics, maybe food science along that way.

Before I get into that, I just like to clear something up, I'm in no way a psychologist, nor am I claiming to be a psychologist.

But I will say that I have served enough people and talked about their problems behind the pine enough to consider myself like a part-time shrink.

And through my guests, I've also learned the kinds of drinks that I can serve them and how I can deliver that to them.

Before I get into that though, I'd like to talk about the dude that pretty much taught me everything I need to know.

It's my dad.

He's also a bartender.

He still bartends to this day.

I grew up chopping lemons, running ice too as well.

And watching him talk to guests and make them feel really happy and smile, which is at the root exactly what we're supposed to be doing.

He's of the mind that as long as you give the guests, exactly what they're looking for in that moment, they can have no reason to complain whatsoever.

And he focuses everything he can on the element of service because to quote him, "A smile makes up for a lot of mistakes.

"And in this industry, "you can't help but make them sometimes."

Good joke.

[audience clapping] Anyways, he taught me that all you need to know to be a successful bartender is to make folks feel welcome and to make them a little bit happier than when they walked into the door.

And I love that thought.

And it's exactly what I tell everybody when I trained them to be bartenders behind the bar.

But when you step into the role of like a bar manager, a bar consultant, or a beverage director, you have to start taking other aspects of the business into consideration to make sure that that one-on-one hospitality, that they're receiving is translated throughout every part of your concept.

And I found that that mostly lies in the product as well as the environment.

Those are the two main avenues to express that hospitality.

So that being said, let's talk about the product a little bit.

On several occasions, I've had guests come up to me and ask me for specs on my drinks.

They'll go home, they'll make it.

And they'll be like sorely disappointed.

And they'll come back and say, "Your bar makes it the best."

And they just give up on their dreams, on the glamorous and opulent life of a cocktail bartender.

And I'm here to say that the dream can live on and that we're looking for folks to hire across the way at Lagoon.

So after the show hit me with them resumes, [audience laughs] [Zack laughs] anybody can follow a recipe, but just like in the kitchen with chefs, it takes a proper bartender with proper training to make a proper drink.

In the end, the main difference falls on the two final elements.

It's the quality of the ingredients and the technique that they're taught.

And hopefully after this, I've shared a few tips to where all you guys can have some really nice drinks on some kitchen countertops real soon.

So with regards to ingredients, more often than not out of all the ingredients you could be using the main culprit for a good versus bad drink is gonna be ice.

I could go on about that for hours.

I love ice.

I think it's a really fun topic, but, I know it sounds super boring.

But what it essentially boils down to is the ice that you're putting in your freezer absorbs all the smells that are in that freezer.

So like frozen peas and chicken breasts and the casserole you forgot about.

That's all in the ice that you're putting in your beverage.

So real quick fix, just spray that thing out, fill it full of new water, put it in a Ziploc bag, boom, fixed.

That's your ice problem.

The other thing that separates a good home cocktail from a bad one is the technique that you're utilizing.

And a lot of people don't know this, but shaking and stirring do two different things to a drink, stirring and shaking, both chill and dilute your beverage.

Stirring is a lot more of an elegant and a pretty way of making a drink.

But what shaking does is it starts to incorporate air into the beverage and on a very, very food science-y microscopic level food science, [audience laughs] it's attaching small bubbles to micro debris and it's making it really fluffy, lively texture.

So at the end of the day, if you don't know whether to stir or shake a beverage, just remember the old adage, it's not so old, but if it's opaque, you shake, it's just that easy.

You know, it's like a Tom Collins, you wanna shake it.

You don't wanna stare at Tom Collins unless you're in the UK.

That's how they do it out there.

[audience laughs] Shout out UK.

That's pretty much what technique boils down to, and you can tell a good bartender from bad one when you walk into their bar.

It takes a lot for them to gain confidence in that ability.

And they're kind of like the knife skills that chefs have, but with cocktail bartenders.

So if you are testing a bartender, if any of you guys are gonna be training bartenders anytime soon, get them to whip up a Daiquiri, get them to stir a Manhattan and see how they strain them.

That's a really big deal too.

You don't want big old ice chunks floating in a Daiquiri, tastes horrible.

The other thing that we talked about was the environment.

Thank you guys so much for bearing with me.

I appreciate you Wade.

And the environment pretty much boils down to two aspects.

It's cleanliness and the organization of the bar.

Cleanliness is pretty obvious.

If you see a table that's really sticky.

If you see just glasses sitting around the place more often than not, that visual cue is gonna be able to tell you what kind of service you're gonna be receiving.

That's gonna be kind of last minute, not really thought of.

But there are some places that take that relationship and they flip it.

So there's this place in Houston called Anvil.

It's one of my favorite bars in the United States.

They have a brass bar top and before every single shift.

And I worked at Pullman Park for like seven years.

And I know polishing brass can be kind of a daunting task.

The bartenders will take a buffer and they'll buff out all the stains on the bar top.

And what that does to them and what Bobby Heugel, who owns that bar.

His philosophy behind that is that it's the first thing that the guest sees when they walk into the space.

And it's the first kind of test you can pass to show them that you actually care about what you're doing.

The other element that I learned a lot about is the spacing of a place.

So with COVID, six feet apart, it teaches you how to...

The amount of space that somebody needs to, not just, one, feel safe, but number two, like how to socialize and feel comfortable around another person.

Some places don't really have as much of a control over that as others.

But what I will say is I worked in a tiny basement bar for a bunch of years, and I will say that they do have control over the amount of people that they allow into their space.

So if you walk into a space and it's crowded, you're not gonna get the best service, which is what it boils down to.

[bell rings] Thank you.

So I'm gonna wrap it up.

[audience laughs] There's a lot that goes into the decisions a bartender makes that lead to what kind of service you're gonna be receiving.

We're all in luck though, because most of the cocktail bars you'll walk into around the Triangle are aware of these things.

And they'll go to great links in their own way to show you that their experience matters, that your experience matters to them.

So my favorite places are, The Crunkleton in Chapel Hill, great spot, Foundation in Raleigh, really great spot, Bar Virgile in Durham, really awesome spot to get great cocktails.

And I'll just close it out with a sentiment from my mentor, Gary, Gary Crunkleton, no relation.

I'm just kidding.

[audience laughs] He said that we're not as much in the drink making business as we are the people business.

And with that being said, I look forward to getting to know everybody across the way at Lagoon and getting to know my people.

And in the spirit of like a Ted talk, I have to ask a question and it's audience engagement.

So are you feeling happier now?

No?

- [Audience] Yes.

[audience cheering] Okay.

Well I guess I know what I'm talking about.

I was really planning on just saying, "Oh well," but nice.

[all laughing] That's all I got.

Thanks, Wade.

[audience cheering] - All right, ladies and gentlemen, questions and answers here for Zach Thomas.

We've got one right here.

We've got one right there.

Excellent.

I'm going to...

I had a bet that didn't actually work 'cause-- - Nice.

- The mic didn't pick it up, but that's okay.

All right.

I'm gonna have a mask on, I'm gonna come back over here first, then over there seconds.

- All softballs y'all, softballs please.

Thank you.

[audience laughs] - Thank you.

So my question is why is it so hard to get a good Mojito at most bars?

[audience laughs] - Yeah, that's a great question.

And I have a...

I actually designed a drink across the way at Lagoon specifically because of that.

It's a point of contention in the bartending world and it really doesn't take that much energy to make a Mojito.

It's just that somebody told bartenders they hate it and now everybody hates it.

You know, it's a really, really easy drink to make, but it's because bartenders are also like part-time like superstars and they're also prima donnas, so they'll just find a reason to be upset.

[laughs] Not me of course.

- [Wade] All right.

Next question.

Over here to your right.

- [Female With Soft Voice] Thank you, Zach.

- Yeah.

- So you talked about ice grabbing all of those freezer flavors.

Have you ever used that to your advantage to make like an oral barista or something to make an ever-evolving drink?

- Man.

These are just the best questions.

Thank you so much.

I actually discovered recently I've been working on how to make clear ice with a cooler.

So if you guys don't know how to make clear ice, you get just a plastic cooler from Walmart and it's the concept of directional freezing.

It's essentially five sides are insulated, one side is not insulated and it creates clear ice by pushing all the air and the impurities out of the bottom of it.

And if there's a smallest amount of debris, it will start to frost up and it won't look that great.

But I found recently that if you put cucumbers in it and let it rest, it'll taste like cucumbers.

So, and it's crystal clear.

So yes, I absolutely have, and I love it so much.

Thank you for asking that that's such, that's so wild.

Do you follow my Instagram or something?

[all laughing] That's really awesome.

- All right.

Next question over here to your left.

- Hi.

Another specific drink question.

Like why do so many bars use sour mix in their Margaritas when that I think that kinda makes it too bitter.

[audience cheers] - The real short of it is that they're cheap and they don't recognize the importance of fresh ingredients.

Sour mix has almost an indefinite...

I mean, I don't, I'm not, I don't know food processing, but so their belief, it's an indefinite shelf life.

I've walked into some bars that I've consulted before and I've like literally dusted them off the sour mix.

So if you wanna make a sour mix at home, it's really, really simple.

It's one part lemon juice, one part lime juice, one part orange juice to three parts, sugar and water.

And it makes a great sour mix.

Fresh juice though is kind of the pivoting point in the early 1990s from this guy named Dale DeGroff in New York, he introduced that at a place called the Rainbow Room and it kind of revolutionized cocktails.

So that was actually the pivoting ingredient that switched everything for the cocktail world.

So thank you.

- And our next question will be over to your right.

- Hi, great talk.

I'm actually a big fan of Jon Taffer's "Bar Rescue".

- Nice.

- And I had a question.

What do you think about his methods for saving a failing bar?

And what do you actually think about Jon Taffer?

- Yeah.

Nice.

I love that show, man.

It's a great show.

Jon Taffer himself is kind of a dinosaur in this industry, but I think he knows what he's doing.

And especially the people that he's consulting for it.

There was a bar in Raleigh called Cashmere on Glenwood Ave that he turned into Dual and it almost doubled and triple in profits within the first year.

So the man absolutely knows what he's doing.

The thing is like he tries to apply a lot of volume concepts to craft environments and that sometimes doesn't work, but overall, I love that guy.

- [Wade] All right, ladies and gentlemen, big hand for Zack Thomas.

- Thanks, guys.

[audience cheers] - Excellent.

We've got lots of great questions, which makes me real happy.

Many, if not all, of our speakers will hang out for a little bit after the show so if you have questions that you didn't get a chance to ask on the microphone, you may have a chance to ask them to the person face to face after the show is over and when the bar is opened up.

Are you gonna be tending the bar over there?

- [Zack Thomas] No.

- No.

Okay.

He's off the clock.

[audience laughs] And there are no cocktails to mix.

It's all beer and wine.

Ladies and gentlemen, our third speaker of the evening, she holds a bachelor's in Food and Fermentation Science from Oregon State University and a doctorate in Food Science from North Carolina State.

From Foodwit, please, welcome Dr. Jennifer Fideler Moore.

[audience cheers] - I'm just wondering if that guy's up for hire to announce my voicemail.

He says, yes.

It's kind of like a "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me," but way better.

- [Wade] I have actually done voicemail for people before, it's true.

- All right, that's cool.

'Cause you're gonna do it tonight.

All right.

So tonight I'm going to take you through a question that I know all of you have been wondering for most of your lives.

If fermented fruits and vegetables are actually healthy.

And we're gonna dive right into fermentation.

So, lactic acid fermentation is a technology, a food processing technology if you will, that has been used for thousands of years.

This processing technology involves the use of lactic acid bacteria, and it transforms naturally occurring sugars like glucose and fructose into lactic acid.

And that's how we get pickles from cucumbers, kimchi from cabbage and many other foods.

Now between five and 40% of the diet of all people across the world consists of lactic acid fermented foods.

That's a lot of food.

So we have lots of different foods that we eat on a regular basis.

Whether that's your morning coffee, your afternoon chocolate, cheese, olives, soy sauce, pickles.

and all of these contain health benefits.

And we typically think of fermented foods as being healthy because they contain probiotics or live microorganisms, but we're gonna crush some dreams real quick here, because most lactic acid fermented fruits and vegetables do not have probiotics and oftentimes undergo heat processing to ensure shelf stability.

So pasteurization, or maybe even sterilization, if they're canned.

So while we don't have live microorganisms in most of these foods, we do have bioactive compounds.

So that means that we have chemical reactions that are happening during fermentation that leave the food with new compounds, either transformed or released from the foods.

These compounds may be amino acids, bioactive peptides, vitamins, exopolysaccharides, neuro-transmitters, the list goes on.

Now to demonstrate this difference, we're gonna take a page out of my doctoral research and yes, I am a pickle doctor.

I will take questions later.

So there are two types of pickles.

There's fermented pickles and there's acidified pickles.

The acidified ones are the ones that we think about making at home a lot of the time where we do a brine with vinegar.

And then fermented obviously, use lactic acid bacteria.

Now within these two types of pickles, we also have pasteurized or heat process for shelf stability and fermented or refrigerated, which maintain a much shorter shelf life.

But of these four types of pickles, only the fermented refrigerated have the chance of containing live microorganisms, or I should say intentional live microorganisms.

But both types of fermented pickles do contain higher amounts of bioactive compounds than their acidified counterparts.

So when we look at these bioactive compounds, we're gonna take two examples today.

The first is bioactive peptides.

So bioactive peptide is a sequence of amino acids, usually about three to six amino acids long, and it is encrypted within a much, much larger protein.

But this bioactive peptide is not active until it's released from that protein.

So bioactive peptides can be, antioxidant, they can boost your immune system.

They can make you feel happier.

They can fight cancer, they can combat blood clots.

There's lots of different functionalities for these peptides.

And we've found them in tons and tons of different fermented foods.

So if we apply this concept to food, we look at wheat and wheat is made into sourdough bread, the proteins that are in that wheat are broken down by the lactic acid bacteria and bioactive peptides are released.

Those bioactive peptides stay in the bread, even after it's baked.

They're heat stable, which is much more than we can say for the microorganisms that did the work and died a quick and painful death in the oven.

So that means even fermented foods that don't have live organisms have healthful compounds.

The second example is ascorbigen.

Ascorbigen is an anticancer compound, and it can be formed during fermentation of things like broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, mustard greens, anything of the brassica type variety.

Fermentation helps this process in two different ways.

First, there is an inactive precursor, glucobrassicin that is physically separated from the enzyme, myrosinase that is supposed to do the work on it.

It's physically separated within the plant cell, but during manufacturing of certain fermented products like kimchi or sauerkraut, that cabbage is cut up and shredded, and those cells are broken down.

And these two compounds are allowed to make contact and continue on to an intermediate.

So you could chop your cabbage and get a little bit more of this, but fermentation really helps when it drops the pH into an optimal range for the final reaction.

So scientists have found that cabbage that's been fermented contains 10 to 20 times the amount of this anticancer compound that raw cabbage or acidified cabbage might have.

That's a big impact for these lactic acid bacteria.

So we look at all these foods and we say, they've got anti-cancer compounds, they've got antioxidants.

It's gonna lower your blood pressure.

It's gonna make you feel happier.

It's got neuro-transmitters in it, but we still have to ask ourselves, how do we know if eating these foods are actually going to improve our health?

And the answer as it is with most scientific studies is that we need human trials.

There is a significant lack of randomized control trials for fermented fruits and vegetables.

And for the most part, these trials involve feeding humans, purified, isolated compounds.

Now, if you've thought about that, it means that we don't know what the effect of the actual food is.

We know that the effect of one compound is, but we don't know how that food affects the release of that compound.

How that compound interacts with other foods when it gets into your digestive system, or even if it actually makes it to the correct site of action.

So what we really need to be doing is feeding people whole fermented foods.

But food is complex.

People are complex.

These answers are difficult to come by.

So in coming back to our original question of are fermented fruits and vegetables really healthy?

My advice to you is to eat fermented fruits and vegetables.

Not because they contain probiotics because they likely don't, but because they have significantly beneficial bioactive compounds that just might make you healthier.

[crowd applauding] - All I'm saying is if you need a volunteer to eat all of the pickles and sauerkraut, I'm your guy.

I'm your guy.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, we have fermented some questions.

[crowd booing] Boo all you want.

It only makes me stronger.

All right, we'll start over here with a couple of questions and make our way around the room first in the back row, coming your way.

- I reflect on my sophomore year of college many years ago when I woke up very hung over one morning, I reached in the refrigerator and grabbed what I thought was a jar of water.

And it was a pickle jar.

Everyone had eaten the pickles, but it was a Dill pickles jar.

And I drank a cup of gulps of Dill pickle juice before I realized it was Dill pickle juice.

I don't know, for the next hour or so I was burping from time to time and all that, but I realized that I am recovering fairly quickly.

Obviously being hung over is dehydration and such.

So could you briefly explain what the benefits of pickle juice, Dill pickle juice, et cetera, and why it's found to be such a significant rehydrator.

Thank you.

- So pickle juice or pickle slushies if you've seen the frozen ones.

I have tried those, absolutely disgusting.

So oftentimes pickle juice is drunk by runners.

And I know athletic trainers actually keep packets of mustard with them to help athletes overcome cramps in an immediate time because they have salt in them.

So part of the therapeutic effect of drinking a brine, So water and salt type beverage is you basically had Dill Gatorade is what you were drinking.

But if it had pickles in it, that means that anything that was water soluble would have leached into that brine as well.

So we've found that the brine of fermented products often contains bioactive compounds along with the fruit itself, cucumber being a fruit.

So amino acids, sugars, things like that are gonna leach into the brine as well.

You may have been onto something.

- That's it, Dill Gatorade is my rap name.

All right, next question, right here on the front row.

- I was interested in your discussion of kimchi because I spent a lot of time in Korea and I married a Korean girl and I eat a lot of kimchi.

And the Koreans don't just eat kimchi, but a lot of their fresh side dishes are fermented also.

And you mentioned that kimchi and others, this bio whatever is anti-cancer agent, but they do have a higher incidence of stomach cancer.

So I don't know if you're aware of that.

- I am familiar with kimchi in the sense that there are a lot more studies that come out of Korea on the health benefits of kimchi.

There's actually been some randomized controlled trials of feeding people kimchi and looking at weight loss.

I haven't looked into stomach cancer as much.

And it's interesting.

I will point out with kimchi, there's also fish sauce added or fish, or some sort of like higher protein material added in that fermentation, which is going to provide more material for the formation of bioactive peptides.

So really it depends on what you mixed together.

And there are so many different types of either regional or national dishes that are fermented, especially throughout Southeast Asia.

- Kimchi slaps if we're being honest.

All right, next question over here.

- Thank you.

Fermented beverages and functional probiotics and functional beverages is growing a lot.

So I wanted to see how do you see maybe what's more on the processing side, but how do they have probiotics in shelf stable beverages?

Is it more of just a marketing thing on the label?

If it's not added afterwards, how are they able to process that and keep some of those probiotics into that fermented beverage, whether it's kombuchas, vinegar drinks, whatever?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

So how are probiotics able to be present in shelf stable foods?

Well, it took us a long time to get there as food scientists.

A lot of it has to do with technology and how those probiotics are prepared, whether they're encapsulated, how they're dried, how they are prepared in order to stay stable within that food and not either ferment it themselves or die.

So there's a lot of technology going on there.

- All right, any other questions?

Raise your hand, awesome.

Also as a reminder, our question treats are sunscreen.

Please do not try to drink them.

All right, next question right here in the front row.

- Thanks, what is your favorite brand of fermented refrigerated pickles that I could buy at Harris Teeter?

- Bubbies easily, easily Bubbies.

- Yeah, I'm taking notes on that one too.

Any other questions about fermented food?

We've got one in the way back.

I will be heading back there for our final question about fermented foods.

Get the last question here.

- So I have a question about kimchi as well.

I like to eat kimchi and I buy kimchi and it's expensive.

So a couple of years ago I tried to make my own, and then I got scared and I thought, can it go awry?

Can you make kimchi that becomes dangerous?

Is there something we should know as a home kimchi makers that we need to watch out for?

- Absolutely, I would say salt is your friend.

First and foremost, you want to maintain the correct amount of salt.

And sometimes there's a little bit of acid added at the beginning too.

Sometimes when fermentations are started, we add a little bit of vinegar to help select for the right bacteria.

But salt is really the key.

Some resources like extension offices.

I don't know if NC state has an extension office that would provide material on that, they should.

But most states have some sort of resource for proper fermentation, canning, things like that, because it really is important what starting materials you're putting in there so that you don't foster growth of pathogenic organisms or really anything that would spoil it too.

And if you're really concerned, get pH strips.

That's really gonna help if you don't have a pH meter at home.

And I don't, who does?

- Nobody wants sentient kimchi.

We don't want that.

Ladies and gentlemen, a big hand for Dr. Jennifer Fideler Moore.

[crowd applauding] I don't want to call out any audiences or anything, but y'all are bringing the questions tonight and I appreciate it for one, but we are now to our final speaker of the evening.

He's curiosity about life has let him do a career focusing on health and how to improve it through innovation coming to us from Panaceutics Nutrition, please welcome Staton Noel.

- Hello, man when he announces my name, I feel like I should jump out here and start skating really fast or something, but quite a voice there, man.

Go Canes.

So tonight, on the right slide.

I'm not supposed to push the bottom.

There it is.

So I'm gonna talk to you about, let's have trouble right off the bat, personalized nutrition.

It's a new hot topic.

In the last 10 years, there's been about 200,000 scientific articles written about this area.

The market size for personalized nutrition products and services is expected to be about $11 billion in the next five years.

So I know a lot of people in this area know about personalized medicine and personalized nutrition is very much like that.

So it starts with food.

What is nutrition?

Is it good for us?

Is it that you've heard food is medicine?

Maybe you've heard that term where we use it preventatively or that people think it has some curative properties, but is it poison really?

When you look at we have 650,000 plus deaths every year related to diet induced illnesses, we have to think are we doing something wrong?

Right now in the United States, over 40% of the people are obese.

We have somewhere between one in three, every third, American has either diabetes or pre-diabetes.

So clearly we're not eating food the right way.

Or you can blame it on you eat too much.

There's some lots of theories about that going on that can be talked about in detail.

But clearly we need to think about how we do this eating thing that we all love to do differently.

So where it starts is where we've all been given general recommendations of what to eat six to eight fruits and vegetables a day and dairy and all that.

But what that doesn't do is it really takes into account, this one size fit all doesn't take into account our differences.

And our differences around how we respond to foods is one of them.

There in the last five years, there's been several really large studies showing that people after eating up food or a single food or a meal actually have very individualized response metabolically.

And I'm not gonna go into all the metabolic parameters that were measured, but they're different.

In other words, if I eat a piece of white bread, my response to that is different than yours and yours and yours.

And so as we understand more about this, we need to take that into account on what we eat.

The other thing that goes on is you've heard it tonight several times already is what's in the food is highly variable.

As a former pharmacologist for a pharmaceutical company, when you think about taking medicines, you know what that drug is and what that dose is.

Right now we eat foods that we're not really sure what's in them.

They're highly variable.

We've heard processing changes it.

We've heard pickling changes it and you have bioactive compounds and we get the variation because we all digest things differently.

We absorb things differently.

We then metabolize those compounds differently in our body.

And then they have different responses on us.

So in general, when we're thinking about how to eat, we're not even thinking about our individual differences and personalized nutrition is a way to start addressing that.

And that's the definition of it.

It's utilizing what we know about individual biology at this point, and that's your genetics, your microbiome, your health status, your lifestyle, where you're at, are you old?

You're young, you've run, you don't work out at all, your age, all your physiological needs.

The environment that you live in is important.

What are your eating habit drivers?

And when I say environment is also geographical.

Some people who live up north don't get enough vitamin D. We all know that, but we don't know how to really get it into our diet the whole time.

There's areas where there's deficiency in the selenium and soil, so we're not that.

And then taking in what's actually in the food or in the products that we're eating and encompassing that into a tailored made recommendation and diet that helps people stay healthy, possibly prevent some of these diseases coming home.

And I will say personalization as a recommendation is very powerful.

There's been several studies done in Europe called the Food For Me study.

We're giving somebody a recommendation that is not just a general guideline, just eat this set of foods, but something very precise has people stay on that diet for a much longer time.

So no diet is good if you're not adherent to it, or no medicines are good if you're not adherent to it.

So trying to drive that adherence piece because we're talking about you and everybody really likes to talk about themselves.

So, right now nutrition and personalization is a health journey and it starts with evaluation of yourself.

We can do this through genomics, microbiome, blood testing of different levels of nutrients in your body, you behaviors or symptoms.

All of this can be taken in account in evaluation.

And you'll see a lot of companies out there doing that right now.

And actually a lot of medical systems are starting to take in more and more information that will impact how you eat every day.

The other piece is then how do you take all that?

A mass amount of data and turn it into a validated recommendation.

And this is really an emerging area.

We're really leveraging two things now.

And that's registered dieticians in the market that can help people guide from their data.

Or as we know in this area, big data area, AI machine learning, there's multiple companies and organizations now they're really trying to gather data real-time and put it into something meaningful, based on a person's recommend biology.

They can change their metabolic parameters.

Finally, this is nice, but it needs to be accessible, affordable, and also convenient because if you make something too complicated, people aren't gonna do it.

That's known.

So the industry, the food science industry in the world has a paradigm that they have to deal with right now, if you want to do individualizing nutrition, how do you scale that?

Because everything now is mass scaled made in big bulk.

And so that's a challenge for the industry.

I will say, there are a lot of people who are starting to solve that problem.

And finally, part of that, thank you, is monitoring and feedback and recommendations.

This is a circle, you have to do the intervention and then monitor what's happening.

And in today's world, everybody's wearing a wearable where direct to consumer testing is available, and there are ways to feed that data back in to make it the second evaluation and see how you progress.

I'm gonna say, thank you for your time and listening to me.

Now, I'll take some of your really hard questions and I don't expect to have any ones about what should I drink tonight?

[crowd applauding] - All right, if you've got questions, raise your hand.

We can get those questions answered.

Just get your hands raised about personalized nutrition.

How does that happen?

We've got one right here in the middle.

- I have so many questions, I'll pick one.

So I'm thinking about from my perspective, how am I gonna interact with personalized nutrition?

Is my doctor gonna prescribe me something?

Or am I gonna be wearing a watch that tells me what I should be doing?

Or are one of those scenarios more feasible than another?

I'm curious about how it really reaches the masses.

- Yeah, exactly.

If you look out there right now, there's a lot of ways to engage in that.

Just simply, because of COVID, there's a lot more available testing direct to consumer.

So if you're concerned that your vitamin D levels aren't right, you can get those tested.

So there's a lot of testing.

There are companies out there that are doing comprehensive testing across that, and then making recommendations, selling products or menus or recipes.

But there's also doctors in this, depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

I think if you really look at the world from a disease state, diabetes, and obesity, you'll see more of a healthcare practitioner approach to it.

If you're looking at it more lifestyle, I'm trying to optimize my health to live as long as I want to or run that next race.

It's a lot more a direct to consumer kind of play.

- All right, got another question here in the middle aisle.

- Hi, good presentation.

I've been working on this area for some time now.

One of the things people tell is what to do?

Even in the personalization of nutrition, but one missing link is what not to do, what not to eat, how not to eat.

That seems to be the biggest contribution to a lot of illnesses around there.

- Yeah, I agree.

And I didn't mention the fact that not only we not know what we're eating, when we eat healthy foods, what's actually in there from processing, growing.

We also in our food, we know we have things that are in the diet at what I would consider unusually high levels and that's around some fats.

So we don't really know what those long-term impacts are.

So you're right.

Telling people what not to do is as important as telling them what to do, but we've been telling people to eat well and run for a long time.

And that hasn't been very helpful.

So I think we need more precise directions.

You do this.

- All right, next question.

Over here to your left.

- I'm curious how you see large food and beverage companies adopting this sort of personalized nutrition, because it seems like it might go against some of them.

I know better for you is obviously a big thing for these companies and they're diversifying, but how would they really get into this and would that help with adoption or would that stop it?

- So, because that's what we do at Panaceutics Nutrition, we're in this business.

We work with a lot of these big CPG companies and I think they are struggling with what I exactly said at the end is how do you scale for an individual?

So they're really used to figuring out what the market might buy and then making a ton of it.

But they're not ready yet for how do I take somebody's data and their information and how do I make a product or service on that.

Right now, what you see a lot going on is curating of products.

So they'll just fill your basket with things that they already sell that says, hey, these are good for you.

And that's a start.

- And our last question coming from the back.

Oh no, we are punting on that question.

Let's see.

We will go to the middle aisle here for our last question.

22 years improv folks, I'm able to handle this.

All right, here we go.

- Thank you.

As you just mentioned, there is a money motivation behind anything that is advertised as good and not good for us.

What is your opinion on the plant-based diet?

- I will say if you eat a plant-based diet, you need to test yourself and make sure you're getting all your biomarkers where they need to be.

I'll put it this way.

It's hard to predict what you're gonna absorb and get into your body or what you're gonna be lacking.

It's a lot easier to test for that.

And that's where personalized nutrition is different.

We're talking about testing at the individual level that they're predicting what somebody should be eating from the latest diet recommendations or the latest big clinical study that was an aggregation of a bunch of people.

- All right y'all.

A big hand for Staton Noel.

[crowd applauding] Thankfully it sounds like my plan to cannibalize, Robert plant is still on the agenda, excellent.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of RTP 180 for September.

[Wade booing] But that means the bar's gonna open back up, yay!

Next month, we are gonna be right back at you on the third Thursday, talking about cyber security and whoa.

There was a reaction in the crowd that was unexpected.

Cybersecurity, maybe you'll be one of our speakers.

I don't know.

We have five topics up for bid here for cybersecurity.

Come right back here to the frontier.

Third Thursday in October, or tune in to pbsnc.org to see it live.

Also one last reminder, before we open up the taps out of office coming up on the first, second and fourth Thursdays, right after work.

So next Thursday swing on by have a beer on us.

On behalf of RTB 180 presented by RTI International.

I've been your MC Wade Minter.

And thank you for joining us here.

Bar's gonna open in just a minute and have a safe journey home.

Goodnight, everybody.

[crowd applauding] ♪