Oats May Be Natural, But So Is Their Toxic Mold


Oats are often touted for lowering bad cholesterol,  improving the immune system, lowering blood pressure and, more recently, being gluten-free, but a new study finds that some oat-based breakfast cereals in the U.S. contain a mold-related toxin called ochratoxin A (OTA) that's been linked to kidney cancer in animal studies. 

Natural or not, they may need closer monitoring for potential mold contamination, warns a paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 

Dojin Ryu and Hyun Jung Lee note that ochratoxin A is one of the most common toxic products released by molds in the world. Previous studies have found the toxin in samples of pork, dried fruits, wine, coffee and other products. Scientists don't yet know how the toxin affects human health, but the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization, classifies it as a possible human carcinogen. 

Animals exposed to ochratoxin A  in experiments developed kidney tumors and although the U.S. doesn't currently regulate the contaminant, the European Union has set maximum limits for ochratoxin A in food. Ryu and Lee wanted to see how U.S. breakfast cereals -- a staple in many Americans' diets -- measured up to that standard. 

The researchers tested close to 500 samples of corn-, rice-, wheat- and oat-based breakfast cereals purchased from U.S. stores over two years. They found that in most samples, OTA levels were lower than the European threshold. But concentrations exceeded the EU standard in 8 percent of oat-based breakfast cereal samples. 

The researchers conclude that oat production, storage and processing need careful review to better protect consumer health.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fussy eaters: the favoured food of Salmonella

Image
As antibiotic resistance increases the search for new anti-bacterial treatments becomes more and more important. One way to design anti-bacterials is to find specific biochemical pathways that the bacteria require to survive, and develop drugs that block off these pathways. Some pathways are better targets than others and for  Salmonella bacteria it was thought that pathways dealing with nutrient metabolises would be a lost cause. Salmonella lives in the intestine, which hosts a whole variety of different nutrients, so surely preventing the bacteria from using a specific one wouldn’t cause them much undue distress. It’s been found, however, that as they grow and spread in the inflamed intestine the bacteria are heavily reliant on one particular nutrient: fructose-asparagine. The chemical structure of fructose-asparagine, image from the reference. The importance of fructose-asparagine metabolism was originally discovered durin...
Read more

Timing is key for bacteria surviving antibiotics

For bacteria facing a dose of antibiotics, timing might be the key to evading destruction. In a series of experiments, Princeton researchers found that cells that repaired DNA damaged by antibiotics before resuming growth had a much better chance of surviving treatment. When antibiotics hit a population of bacteria, often a small fraction of "persister" cells survive to pose a threat of recurrent infection. Unlike bacteria with genetic resistance to antibiotics, evidence suggests that persisters stay alive in part by stalling cellular processes targeted by the drugs. In a new study, Princeton researchers examined a class of antibiotics that target bacterial DNA. In bacterial populations, some cells repair damaged DNA before resuming growth, and others resume growth before making repairs. The researchers found that those that make repairs before resuming growth generally are the ones that survive as persisters. The research advances a long-term goal to make ...
Read more