Because you asked...modified food starch
>> Monday, May 4, 2009
A reader asked me a little while back about the ingredient "modified food starch" - what is it and should it be avoided. Great question! Modified food starch is a very common ingredient, so let's find out a little about it!
Modified food starch can be made from many different grains - corn, wheat, tapioca, etc. - but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to focus on modified cornstarch. The principles are the same for all of the modified starches.
Why not just use regular starch?
Let's start by talking about unmodified starch. Starch, a long-chain carbohydrate, is the food reserves of many plants - including corn. In making cornstarch, the corn kernels are soaked and the outer covering removed. The embryo - or the center of the kernel that would form a new corn plant - is also removed. The remaining part of the kernel is mostly starch, which is dried and ground into a fine powder. (For a more detailed description of cornstarch processing, check out this article from the International Starch Institute.) Dent corn, a "field" corn, seems to be the corn most often used to make cornstarch.
Unmodified cornstarch breaks down when heated too much, which is why gravy made with cornstarch is often watery and thin when reheated the next day. Cornstarch also does not hold up well in acidic environments. To minimize the limitations of cornstarch, processed foods often use "modified cornstarch." Cornstarch is modified by applying different reaction conditions to produce the desired end product. The starch can be physically modified, chemically modified, or enzymatically modified. The starch retains its granular form and often resembles the original starch, but the modification results in improved properties.
How is modified food starch used?
Modified food starches are used in a mind-boggling variety of products - luncheon meats, orange juice, baked goods, biofuels, bioplastics, and the list goes on - for a variety of reasons. Modified food starches are used as gelling agents, insuring that foods maintain the correct texture in both frozen and microwaved foods. They're used as thickeners in fat-free dairy products. They're used as bulking agents to increase the bulk of a food without affecting its nutritional value. Modified food starches might be used as an anti-caking agent to keep foods free-flowing, or as an inexpensive way to control moisure in a food product. In low-fat meat products, modified food starch is used as a binder.
Is modified food starch dangerous?
The accepted answer to this question is that modified food starch is harmless. Modified food starch doesn't really have any nutritional value, but it does serve a useful purpose in processed foods. The one concern noted is that manufacturing of modified food starch is not tranparent. There is virtually no way to find out how the modified food starch used in a product was produced - what chemicals or enzymes were used, if used at all, for example - and the possibility of trace chemical contamination bothers some.
I'll note that people sensitive to wheat or gluten should avoid products with modified food starch as an ingredient unless it specifically states that the product is gluten free or states the specific type of starch used. Many manufacturers will use whatever food starch is cheapest or readily available for their product - corn, wheat, or otherwise.
Should you avoid foods with modified food starch?
That's a personal decision. If you don't like the idea of a heavily processed ingredient, then you would probably be happier without modified food starch in your life. Having done a little research, I'm not bothered by this ingredient, so personally, I'm not avoiding foods made with modified food starch.
Thanks so much for the question, Barb! Have an ingredient of a nutrition question? E-mail me! It might take me a little while, but I'll try to answer in a post!
9 comments:
When deciding whether to avoid modified food starch it's important to look at the entire food the ingredient is in, and not just the information about a single ingredient. Processed foods are almost always high in sodium for example.
The vast majority of food-like products that contain modified food starch aren't what your great grand mother would have known as food.
Any diet high in processed foods is certain to be lower on whole plant based foods. If your not eating your food whole, you're almost certainly setting yourself up for a whole host of illnesses and ill affects.
Thanks for enlightening us about this ingredient. I used to work at a company that sold bakery ingredients and we sold a lot of modified starch to people who made meat pies, so I sort of knew what it was for, but I had not idea it was used so extensively.
I agree with Greg that the key to good health is to avoid processed foods as far as possible, so by default, modified starch shouldn't feature in our diets.
Greg - I agree with you - wholeheartedly. BUT, for those of us who are greatly reducing their intake of processed foods but not necessarily eliminating them all, I think that it's good to know what these ingredients are. Some ingredients are downright scary, but others are a bit more innocuous. Modified food starch seems ubiquitous in processed foods - and not always overly processed ones. To avoid or not is a personal choice, but I feel more comfortable with this particular ingredient. I DO agree with you that we need to look at the ingredient list as a whole when buying foods though - regardless of the processing.
Hanlie - So interesting that you actually sold this ingredient! Always love hearing your thoughts!
thanks for sharing your findings, that was insightful. another factor to consider is the amount of starch used. if it falls low down on the ingredient list only a small amount is used in the product. i'd be more likely to avoid a product that has modified start listed higher in the ingredient list because it is a poster child for "food bit" it's not a whole food, and it's the part of a grain that has the least amount of nutrients.
I didn't know anything about modified food starch. I prefer to feed my family only whole natural foods but haven't thought much about this. I trust your judgment and won't worry too much about modified food starch. Thank you for sharing this very informative article!
The only concern that I have about modified starch is that it frequently contains MSG. Whatever you feel about MSG it's part of the manufacturing process for modified starches.
As one less concerned with processed foods (that which does not kill me has made a tactical error), I was coming here mostly curious as to what, exactly, "modified" food starch is, and my curiosity has been satisfied! Thank you! I don't intend to avoid it, but I will be more conscious of products that use it (as another already noted) toward the top of the ingredient list.
I think it's curious that everyone keeps commenting that starch has no nutrients. Of course it does, it's carbohydrate. It's a long, often branched chain of glucose molecules. If you don't consider carbohydrate a nutrient, consider this. Your brain requires ~100g of glucose per day to fully function, whether it gets that from starch or sugar, it needs it. Also, I've never heard of MSG being used in the manufacture of modified starch, particularly because there are hundreds of modified starches. I'd check Fennema's Food Chemistry to be sure, but there really shouldn't be any in there. Being a PhD in chemical engineering, you'd probably find it an interesting reference. I highly recommend a copy. Also you can check out tateandlyle.com or nationalstarch.com to see the multitudes of starches available to the food industry, these two companies are probably the largest starch suppliers to food manufacturers in the country. If you look around you'll probably find application guides that tell you what types of starches are used for what types of processed foods. What I also find interesting and almost humorous is that you're completely against HFCS, which starts out as corn starch and is enzymatically modified to a final product, yet you're fine with modified food starch, which starts as a corn starch and may very well be enzymatically modified to a final product. Yeah, that makes sense.
Thanks for the level headed discussion. King Arthur Flour just added modified food starch as a "secret ingredient" now available for home bakers, and I was curious about it. I like to keep my baked goods as "natural" as I can, but it promises excellent results. I it somehow delays retrogradation, but I know very little about the manufacturing process. I just got my BS in Food Science, but I focused mostly on microbiology (though I took 5 semesters of chemistry). I really don't feel like slogging through all the scientific articles about it, and I was afraid I would only find alarmist articles about MFS. After reading this, I think I might give it a try. I don't expect it to give me better results than adding sour cream to my cake batter (MY secret ingredient), but as a food scientist, I naturally want to experiment. I'm a bit concerned about the fact that it's probably GMO'd, but eh, I'm curious.
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