A Perth study is going high-tech to find the WA equivalent of the iconic Mediterranean diet which is linked to good health and longevity. And a key ingredient is likely to be locally-grown olives.
Murdoch University researchers are using cutting-edge technology such as mass spectrometry and nuclear resonance spectroscopy to identify WA’s healthiest foods and where you can find them.
Food quality is always influenced by a myriad of factors. Even olive oil, which is made up of only one ingredient, can have different nutritional properties depending on how and where the olives are grown.
With this idea in mind, researchers from Murdoch’s Health Futures Institute are trying to identify molecular fingerprints of foods to create a profile of WA’s best and healthiest foods.
Using portable technology, they are travelling across the State searching and testing foods for key plant compounds such as polyphenols.
According to Professor Elaine Holmes, their work in discovering WA’s healthiest foods could help create tailored dietary advice.
“Once we have these fingerprints and know what the benchmark for ‘good’ is, we can measure different products and their level of nutrition,” Prof Holmes said.
For now, researchers are focusing on profiling WA’s best olive oil, artichokes and truffles and expect to complete their work sometime next month. Some preliminary results show that the geographic location of a product can have important impacts on its composition.
“There are definitely differences in oils from different producers and you can separate by geographical location and by olive variety,” Prof Holmes said. “Some are very distinctive in profile and have higher fatty acid composition, what we haven’t finished profiling yet is the polyphenolic composition, which is more likely to be linked to the health claims.
Foraging out the best foods
In addition to searching for WA’s healthiest food, Prof Holmes also hopes to design a WA-based version of a Mediterranean diet.
Working with people who are at risk of diabetes or metabolic diseases, Prof Holmes and her team have teamed up with Imperial college London to design a tailored diet, based on WA products, that might help prevent or even treat these diseases.
As part of this project, Prof Holmes wants to assess a person’s metabolic response to food by measuring how many calories are being excreted in urine.
“We know that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to diet and some people excrete more calories in their urine than others,” Prof Holmes said.
As an end goal, Prof Holmes and her team hope to design a diet that is specific for a person’s metabolic needs.