Faglige nøgleord: Plant-based food alternatives, chemical food safety
Oplæg tilgængeligt på: Engelsk, lettisk og russisk.
Recently, more and more people are becoming interested in plant-based diets for various reasons. In response to this, plant-based alternatives like dairy and meat substitutes have been introduced into the market. This has also sparked new research in the field of chemical food safety, which focuses on understanding the chemical composition of different food products.
The chemical composition of food products consists of both good (beneficial) and bad (harmful) chemicals. Harmful chemicals can get into food in different ways, either from outside sources or from inside sources. Example of chemicals coming from outside would be pesticides used in agriculture, but from inside – chemicals that arise from reactions between main food building blocks (amino acids and sugars). These harmful chemicals can have negative effects on health, either directly or after the body processes them.
Until now, we haven't fully understood how many harmful chemicals might be present in plant-based alternatives, so we can't be completely sure about how safe they are for consumers. In my PhD project I aim to identify harmful chemicals in plant-based food products by their characteristic “fingerprints”, as well as their transformations in the body.