Sharing information on modern farming practices is key to building public trust in the quality, safety and sustainability of our food supply. Here’s how APG is contributing.

When Alberta farm producers talk about issues that matter to their businesses, the concept of public trust is certain to be mentioned. Recent years have demonstrated the need to build understanding between the 2% of Albertans who farm and the 98% who don’t.

Debra McLennan, Food and Nutrition Coordinator with Alberta Pulse Growers, is taking the lead on public trust initiatives within APG. She believes that many producers are keen to get the conversation started.

“Farmers I’ve worked with tell me how much they want to share their story about their farm,” said McLennan, a Registered Dietitian. “It’s about helping people who don’t know anything about farming understand how farmers take care of the land and produce the healthiest, most nutritious food possible.”

Teachers seek one-stop curriculum shopping

With funding from the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, APG is working with other crop- and livestock-related commissions to share agriculture’s story in a clear and compelling way. This collaboration is essential, in McLennan’s view, to avoid having messages coming from many different sources.

This public trust work is taking place in two main streams: Youth Agriculture Education and Public Agriculture Literacy. Under Youth Agriculture Education, APG is teaming up with Alberta’s barley, wheat and canola commissions. In an initial phase, focus groups helped determine how best to guide teachers in taking accurate ag information into the classroom.

“A number of teachers told us they wanted to talk about agriculture, but hesitated because they didn’t know much about it,” said McLennan. “That’s an ideal opportunity if we pursue it the right way. Teachers were also clear they wanted one place to go for information and not to have different crop and livestock groups all with different resources.”

The crop commissions are now working to develop – and secure funding for – three information modules that address knowledge gaps identified by the research phase.

Healthy and sustainable

The second public trust stream, Public Agriculture Literacy, brings together APG with provincial commissions representing canola, pork and the supply-managed livestock sectors. Millennials (born 1981 to 1996) and Generation Z (born starting in the mid-1990s) are key targets under an initiative known as Be Assured. This work seeks to assure consumers that their food is nutritious, safe and sustainable in environmental terms. Befitting this young adult and teen demographic, tactics are mainly delivered through online and social media platforms. (You can sample the flavour of this initiative at tastealberta.ca).

“An older audience tends to be more interested in nutrition,” McLennan said. “But as you engage with younger people, nutrition combines with sustainability. People feel, ‘I want to eat healthy, I want to understand what our farmers do and I want to do something good for the planet’. We’ll be rolling out new resources under Be Assured all through 2020.”

A made-in-Alberta idea for protein-optimized pet food is showing significant promise and could one day open up a massive new market for pulse growers.

Today’s pet owners are taking more and more care with the diets of their dogs and cats. Our province’s pulse crops could be the perfect feedstock for a new generation of pet foods.

Compared to the meat ingredients traditionally used in pet food, pulses have many qualities that are attractive to pet food manufacturers. Dry pulses are far easier to handle, have a competitive cost per tonne, are less perishable and are an excellent source of protein.

“In another investigation, we’re looking at the characterization of protein in faba beans,” said Thava Vasanthan, a Professor in Agricultural Food and Nutritional Science at the University of Alberta. “Faba bean is an expanding crop in Western Canada and has a protein advantage over field peas.”

The research Vasanthan mentions is a project led by U of A colleague Feral Temelli – see the story on page X – investigating efficient ways to fractionate faba bean for functional food uses. While protein in faba bean is typically around 26%, Temelli’s project investigated removing the outer layers of the faba bean where most of its protein resides, resulting in a faba bean fraction that’s up to 42% protein. This super-ingredient is sure to get the attention of pet food makers.

Digestibility and taste: two important factors

Over the next two years of this three-year research project, Vasanthan and co-investigator University of Alberta Professor Ruurd Zijlstra will optimize the pet food’s protein concentration, manufacture test lines and perform taste trials of the food with dogs.

To ensure optimum digestibility of the pulse protein, Vasanthan and Zijlstra have been testing different enzymes that aid in canine digestion, including phytase and phenolic acid esterase. They’ve found that when these enzymes work in tandem, there’s a significant improvement in the protein’s digestibility.

“We digested the faba bean protein in the presence of these enzymes and took the digestibility from 70% or 80% to start, up to 86%,” he said. “This is an important advantage in pet food where high digestibility of the protein is expected.”

To create the pet food kibble, Vasanthan and Zijlstra will use the state-of-the-art food manufacturing facilities at the new University of Alberta Agri-Food Discovery Place. Sensory testing with dogs will occur late in 2019 under the watchful eye of pet food nutritionist Professor Kate Shoveller from the University of Guelph.

This multi-faceted collaborative research is not only poised to make a difference to the nutrition and economics of pet food manufacturing. It’s also helping to add depth to the academic and technical expertise of Albertans in a growing area of the economy.

“The final aspect of this project is that we’re training graduate students to make them available to work in the pet food industry,” Vasanthan said. “The pet food industry is expanding fast, and they’ll need people to serve the industry.”

A comprehensive aggregation and review of available research finds that regular pulse consumption can significantly lower cholesterol.

Today in Canada, heart disease and diabetes affect millions of lives. In fact, there may be no greater health issue in Canada than the need to prevent or mitigate the damage caused by these conditions.

As John Sievenpiper sees it, however, making an impact on the lives of Canadians won’t require any kind of far-fetched medical moonshot. One important tool has been here all along: pulses.

“In reviewing the evidence, we’re seeing a clearer signal for the benefit of pulses,” said Sievenpiper, a physician and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Nutritional Sciences. “We’re finding that high consumers of pulses have lower cardiovascular disease and lower coronary heart disease incidences than people who are low consumers of pulses.”

Since 2015, with funding from APG and others, Sievenpiper has been looking at the effect of pulses on glycemic control, blood lipids, blood pressure and body weight by analyzing a vast array of available medical research. This included 26 separate research projects encompassing 1,000 people.

Sievenpiper searched for hard evidence that consumption of pulses can help mitigate the impact of heart disease and diabetes. He found plenty.

“Pulses are a pretty incredible food,” Sievenpiper said. “There are a number of mechanisms that relate to the composition of the pulse that would explain their ability to lower blood pressure, lower blood sugar and cholesterol. In particular, pulses have a low glycemic index, they’re a source of viscous fibre that may reduce blood lipids, the pulse plant proteins can lower cholesterol, plus they have anti-nutrients that may help lower blood sugars.”

Include more pulses in daily diet to drive benefits

Sievenpiper is currently in the process of formalizing his findings through a detailed scientific paper, but he’s already begun speaking to medical and health professionals about this project.

The headline benefit of Sievenpiper’s research is that regular pulse consumption (just ¾ cup per day) can lower LDL, the so-called ‘bad cholesterol’,  by 5%.  This benefit is readily accessible. You only need to eat one serving of pulses per day. For some Canadians, this may require a move out of their food comfort zone, but there are signs that this is starting to occur.

The 2016 United Nations International Year of Pulses was a catalyst for the Canadian pulse industry to promote pulses to Canadian consumers. Food manufacturers across North America are beginning to integrate more pulse ingredients into their products. Many consumers are placing greater emphasis on choosing plant-based foods more often.

Given the benefits to individuals’ health and the health of society, Sievenpiper sees Canada’s pulse growers playing a critically important role by continuing to produce home-grown pulses.

“As the awareness around the health benefits of pulses increases,” he said, “I think we have an opportunity to see a meaningful increase in pulses, and with it, a meaningful increase in the health of Canadians.”

This two-year study found that some pea fractions provided better glycemic control than others. The key might lie in understanding the role of gut microbes in this process.

A growing body of scientific evidence is establishing the health benefits of pulse crops. As one example, consumption of peas has been associated with better glycemic control among people with Type 2 diabetes.

University of Alberta scientists Catherine Chan and Jocelyn Ozga have found that the coat of the pea seed – and not the inside of the pea, called the embryo – may be responsible for many of its health benefits.

In 2014, with funding from Alberta Pulse Growers and others, U of A colleague Ben Willing began a two-year project to take this insight further. He investigated how pea seed coats affect gut microbes and how this helps control blood sugars.

“When we consume a diet, such as something with peas, those peas can have a direct effect,” said Willing, “by their nutritive value, as well as by interacting with the intestine after they’re absorbed. But they can also have important effects on the population of microbes. If we can understand the mechanism of how peas provide a benefit, then we can make peas better and

Results vary by pea variety and processing

As Willing explains, this investigation included both laboratory experiments and experiments on mice. For the mice, a study group was fed a high-fat diet to achieve weight gain. These mice were then fed different pea fractions, coat included. The effect on weight, or rate of weight gain, was observed.

The pea formulations fed to the mice differed in two respects. First, they were higher or lower in polyphenolic compounds. Generally, peas that were higher in these compounds resulted in mice gaining weight more slowly. Second, some pea formulations were hydrolyzed, which also was associated with slower weight gain.

“One of the things we found that was really striking was, the high polyphenolic-containing peas had a very different effect on the microbial population than a similar pea that didn’t have those molecules,” said Willing. “You could tell what type of peas a mouse was consuming based on the microbial population. So it’s not just saying that peas have this effect, but that each type of peas has a distinct effect.”

If a person has diabetes or struggles with weight control, including peas in their diet can help. As Ben Willing has shown, hydrolyzed fractions of higher-polyphenolic peas could accelerate this effect, providing better glycemic control and slower weight gain within an otherwise high-fat diet. This knowledge could one day lead to new pea varieties being developed with this application in mind.

“We’re not there yet, so we’re continuing to work on this,” said Willing, “but that’s the ultimate goal: to be able to create cultivars of peas that will maximize health outcomes.” 

Project at a glance

Project title:                Microbial modifying properties of pea seed coat and their role in improved intestinal integrity and reduced insulin resistance

Project lead:                Ben Willing, University of Alberta

Total value of project: $372,875

Start date:                   March 15, 2014

Completion date:        March 15, 2016

With partial funding support from Pulse Canada and others, this study has built a body of data to support a label health claim that even a small serving of beans can lower your blood sugar.

“A serving of beans, instead of low-fibre starchy foods such as corn, rice, potatoes or macaroni, results in reduced blood sugar after a meal.”

Imagine the impact of these words, or something close to them, on the label of a Canadian food product. At a glance, consumers concerned about high blood sugar could see that beans will deliver a benefit.

As Dan Ramdath explains, Health Canada requires a solid body of credible data to support the claim. The reduction in blood sugar must be significant — at least 20% compared to the alternative — and a minimum dose of beans to achieve this effect must be identified.

“Lots of work has been done on the blood glucose lowering effect of beans,” said Ramdath, Senior Research Scientist (Nutrition) with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Guelph, ON. “But there are still gaps we needed to address in order to get the health claim.”

In 2015-16, Ramdath led a study to determine the blood sugar (also known as glycemic) impact of consuming six different types of beans, compared to commonly consumed starchy foods like corn, macaroni, rice and potato.

A smaller serving size

“Our methodology was very simple,” Ramdath said. “We had between 12 and 24 healthy volunteers involved in the study. They came in 10 times and consumed randomly a half-cup or quarter-cup serving of six different beans, as well as the four starchier alternatives.”

An overnight fast ensured that any effect seen in blood sugar could be linked to the foods consumed that morning. Finger-prick blood tests were performed on each volunteer seven times in the two hours following their test meal.

To support a health claim, it was necessary to find a 20% improvement. As it happened, consuming one of the six types of beans resulted in blood sugar that was 32% to 65% lower than with the corn, macaroni, rice and potato. What’s more, the half-cup and quarter-cup bean servings performed roughly comparably in terms of glycemic impact.

Based on this study, Ramdath sees a data set that should be highly compelling for Health Canada as it considers a blood sugar health claim for beans.

This is great news for Canadian consumers, who may soon have an easy way to choose beans on scientific health evidence. As Ramdath sees it, the news is also good for anyone who grows beans for a living.

“If I was speaking to bean growers, I’d say we found that even a small amount of beans makes a huge difference,” he said. “Keep growing them, and we will continue to find ways to improve the health of Canadians and the economic vitality of the pulse-growing sector. And a big thank you to growers for financially supporting research that is critical to advancing a pulse health claim.”

Project at a glance

Project title:                Glycemic impact of selected Ontario beans: comparison with corn, macaroni, rice and potatoes

Project lead:                Dan Ramdath, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

Total value of project:    $16,000

Start date:                   2014

Completion date:        2016

Beans for health: a little goes a long way

With partial funding support from Pulse Canada and others, this study has built a body of data to support a label health claim that even a small serving of beans can lower your blood sugar.

“A serving of beans, instead of low-fibre starchy foods such as corn, rice, potatoes or macaroni, results in reduced blood sugar after a meal.”

Imagine the impact of these words, or something close to them, on the label of a Canadian food product. At a glance, consumers concerned about high blood sugar could see that beans will deliver a benefit.

As Dan Ramdath explains, Health Canada requires a solid body of credible data to support the claim. The reduction in blood sugar must be significant — at least 20% compared to the alternative — and a minimum dose of beans to achieve this effect must be identified.

“Lots of work has been done on the blood glucose lowering effect of beans,” said Ramdath, Senior Research Scientist (Nutrition) with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Guelph, ON. “But there are still gaps we needed to address in order to get the health claim.”

In 2015-16, Ramdath led a study to determine the blood sugar (also known as glycemic) impact of consuming six different types of beans, compared to commonly consumed starchy foods like corn, macaroni, rice and potato.

A smaller serving size

“Our methodology was very simple,” Ramdath said. “We had between 12 and 24 healthy volunteers involved in the study. They came in 10 times and consumed randomly a half-cup or quarter-cup serving of six different beans, as well as the four starchier alternatives.”

An overnight fast ensured that any effect seen in blood sugar could be linked to the foods consumed that morning. Finger-prick blood tests were performed on each volunteer seven times in the two hours following their test meal.

To support a health claim, it was necessary to find a 20% improvement. As it happened, consuming one of the six types of beans resulted in blood sugar that was 32% to 65% lower than with the corn, macaroni, rice and potato. What’s more, the half-cup and quarter-cup bean servings performed roughly comparably in terms of glycemic impact.

Based on this study, Ramdath sees a data set that should be highly compelling for Health Canada as it considers a blood sugar health claim for beans.

This is great news for Canadian consumers, who may soon have an easy way to choose beans on scientific health evidence. As Ramdath sees it, the news is also good for anyone who grows beans for a living.

“If I was speaking to bean growers, I’d say we found that even a small amount of beans makes a huge difference,” he said. “Keep growing them, and we will continue to find ways to improve the health of Canadians and the economic vitality of the pulse-growing sector. And a big thank you to growers for financially supporting research that is critical to advancing a pulse health claim.”