BAE student researches home treatments for Salmonella and wins first prize in IAFP poster competition
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EmailBAE senior Kacey Nelson researches home treatments for Salmonella
Did you know that most consumer flour is a raw food? This may be a surprise as flour itself does not appear like a raw food people know, like eggs. Flour is composed of grains from a field that are ground up and packaged in a facility with no further processing. This can lead to harmful bacteria such as Salmonella being found in the food and when not cooked thoroughly, makes a person ill upon consumption. The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has released information promoting the safe handling of flour to avoid harmful bacteria.
Many home chefs are seeking ways to be able to enjoy raw cookie dough and batters while reducing the risk of foodborne illness. This has led to consumers writing information on home-scale treatments that they say will eliminate the risk of harmful bacteria.
Consumers are using recommended temperatures for meat products as a substitute goal temperature to treat raw flour. Some pathogens are more thermally resistant in low moisture products like flour and can remain viable after heat treatments that usually work in meats. This creates a facade of safety. Consumers may think If it works for meat, it should work for flour, right? said BAE senior Kasey Nelson.
Do heat treatments done by consumers at home on raw flour reduce Salmonella in flour?
This was the question Nelson set out to answer. After combing the internet for various home-scale treatments, Nelson selected three varieties of flour and inoculated them with Salmonella to set up for the study. She went on to conduct the online-sourced home treatments at various time points, recording temperatures as treatment progressed. The maximum treatment time was for ten minutes at 350 F for all flours. Once the treatments were completed, the levels of surviving Salmonella were recorded.
The at-home treatments examined in this study did not meet the levels of safety that consumers expected.
A challenge discovered during this study is there is a lack of public consensus on flour safety parameters, which is indicated by the lack of access to evidence-based resources for consumers. Additional research is needed to test the effectiveness of home-scale heat treatments'solutions such as lengthening treatment time reduced product quality. While well intentioned, the suggested consumer-based treatments were unable to reduce pathogens populations to levels that may be considered as safe. These treatments are still publicly available regardless of their efficacy, which is a public health concern. Said Nelson.
Public awareness has increased in recent years on the risks of flour. While it is encouraging to see the public acknowledging the risks and sharing information, the need to identify and to promote proper public health practices is imperative. As demonstrated by Nelson's experiment, we are still a ways away from developing a treatment that can be considered 'safe.
International Association of Food Protection
Nelson took her research poster and entered the International Association of Food Protection (IAFP) Annual Meeting undergraduate poster competition. She recorded a four-minute presentation presenting her poster highlighting her research, methods and results. Her presentation went on to take first place in this international competition. I'm happy I was able to participate in the annual meeting during a pandemic, Nelson later commented. Presenting digitally was a hurdle at first, but the information is out and available for view at any time. It's nice to contribute to the scientific body and help with consumer safety at the same time.
The IAFP Annual Meeting poster presentation represents the latest methods and technologies related to food safety. There are more than 3,800 attendees from more than fifty countries around the world representing a variety of professions in research, food toxicology, regulatory inspectors, processing operations, and more.
