Handy fact sheet that will help food and drink firms reduce bad fat in products

Researchers at Nottingham University’s Food Innovation Centre hope their latest fact sheet will help tackle the amount of fat and sugar in products

The Government is always trying to encourage food manufacturers to lower the amount of fat and sugar in their products but it seems it’s all too little too late.

Well, Nottingham University is now taking matters into its own hands through its Food Innovation Centre.

Researchers are helping food and drink manufacturers reduce fat in products with a handy fact sheet.

It’s the brainchild of research fellow Dr Wentao Liu, one of the team of advisers at the FIC, which supports food and drinks businesses in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire with expert advice and guidance.

“Fat reduction in food and drink is a very topical subject, and we hope that the FIC’s latest fact sheet will be useful to small and medium-sized businesses looking to cut saturated fats in their products,” said Dr Liu.

It’s the latest in a series of sheets published by the FIC to help businesses become more sustainable and create healthier food and drink.

It’s ideally placed given a growing demand for healthier food, along with efforts by health officials to cut the risk of obesity and obesity-related conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.

The new fact sheet outlines the types of fat that need reducing or replacing and focuses on the challenges in reducing so-called “bad fats”.

It introduces strategies for manufacturers incorporating fat replacements in products that will have both high consumer acceptance and low technical and cost issues.

The FIC was set up to offer free help to eligible manufacturers in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.

It’s a three-year programme under the Driving Research and Innovation project, ­part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund.

A collaboration between the University of Nottingham School of Biosciences, the School of Chemistry and the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing, this one-off project provides free specialist innovation support to small and medium-sized businesses.

As such, it gets my vote.

With this in mind, I can’t see why further collaborations, using the FIC blueprint, cannot be rolled out right across the country.

“We have produced a range of helpful fact sheets around sustainable production and healthy eating, and this latest one turns the spotlight on fat reduction,” said Richard Worrall, head of the FIC.

“Excessive fat intake causes public health issues, but we also know that there is an increased preference for healthy eating currently, with consumers demanding healthier food.

“So it does make good commercial sense for businesses to focus on this issue.”