April '08 | The truth about enzymes
ENZYMES WITH EVERYTHING
The global enzyme market is growing at 8% per year, and is forecast to be worth almost $1.2 billion by 2011. The food enzyme industry constitutes about 23% of the total, while enzymes for detergents and biofuels constitute about 23%, and the remainder are manufactured for pharmaceuticals and diagnostic tests.
In case you never realised that enzymes were so important to your world, it's worth noting that these have become a vital part of the modern (processed) food supply.
Food and beverage manufacturers use enzymes as a “natural” way to improve production efficiency, as well as food quality and consistency. Common examples are the use of chymosin in cheese production, pectinase in the clarification of fruit juice, protease to tenderise meat and to manufacture “high protein goods”, lipase for oilseed extraction, enzyme-cocktails to help bread rise in a hurry, sugar modifiers for the fermentation of alcoholic drinks and other unspecified food processing and flavour-altering agents.
Needless to say, many of these processes are dependent on optimised enzymes available only from GM microbes.
OUR COMMENT
Enzymes never appear on the label because they're considered “processing aids”, and therefore not present in the final food product. However, where they might have gone to seems to be glossed over. Those of you familiar with the tryptophan disaster of 1989, when a health-supplement produced by GM bacteria inadvertently went to market with trace quantities of an unexpected toxin, might prefer full labelling and traceability of all foods treated with GM enzymes.
From the overview of enzyme-uses above it is unlikely you can avoid GM enzymes if you eat any processed food at all. The main GM-avoidance tactic, therefore, is to prepare your own food whenever possible, or shop where the foods are manufactured by the shopkeeper himself and he can tell you exactly what went into his produce.
SOURCE:
- Lorraine Heller, Global enzyme growth driven by innovation, www.naturalingredients.com, 27.09.07.
- Mayeno A.N. And Gleich G.J., Eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome and tryptophan production: a cautionary tale, TIBTECH, 12 Sept 1994.