VATIS UPDATE Article

Scientists at the University of Copenhagnen (UCPH), Denmark, for the first time ever, have created a 3-D image of food on the nanometer scale. It has promising prospects as a more detailed knowledge of the structure of complex food systems could potentially save the food industry large sums of money. “There is still a lot we don’t know about the structure of food, but this is a good step on the way to understanding and finding solutions to a number of problems dealing with food consistency, and which cost the food industry a lot of money,” said Jens Risbo, at UCPH.

The researchers used a cream based on vegetable fat for the research. The cream system is a good test material, since it can represent the structures of a large group of food systems, for example cheese, yogurt, ice cream, spreads, but also the more solid chocolate. All the aforementioned products contain liquid water or fat as well as small particles of solid materials, which stick together and form three-dimensional structures - i.e. a network that provides the consistency that we like about cheese, yogurt or chocolate.

In cheese and yoghurt the casein particles form the network. In chocolate it is the fat crystals and in ice cream and whipped cream it is the fat globules. To create a three-dimensional model of the food and convert it into images and video, the scientists have been in Switzerland, where they have used the Swiss Light Source (SLS) synchrotron at the Paul Scherrer Institute. In the synchrotron electrons are accelerated to near speed of light. The synchrotron is used for research in materials science in areas such as biology and chemistry. The method the researchers used is called “Ptychographic X-ray computed tomography.”