Rice Hull Extract: A Possible Food Preservative

This post is a brief introduction to the article I choose to critique. The researchers involved in this study set out to find a new food preservative that would perform as good as the leading preservative but cost less to produce. The leading preservative is a compound called sesamol, and these scientists hope to produce a better preservative from rice hull extract. The rice hull is the part of the plant that covers the rice seed and protects it from potential damage. The observation that this hull has the unique ability to protect the rice seed from oxidative damage led the research team to hypothesize that it could posses chemicals that would be well suited as a food preservative. However, the team wants to take the research a step further and not only extract the chemicals responsible for oxidative protection, but they also hypothesize they can enhance the antioxidant activity of the rice hull extract by exposing it to far-infrared radiation. Far-infrared radiation simply means the IR rays that are of longer wavelengths.

The research team performed the experiment using turkey meat as the food being preserved. They made a control sample that had no preservative, a sample containing sesamol, a sample containing rice hull extract with no radiation treatment, and a sample with rice hull extract that had been treated with radiation. The results showed that the radiation treatment did enhance the preservation of the rice hull extract, however, it did not perform as well as the sesamol. Visual characteristics of the meat were used to assess the performance of each preservative like darkness, yellowness, and redness, as well as, the amount of oxidative degradation.

The scientists results did show that the sesamol was still the leading preservative, but with some more effort at purifying and isolating the compounds in the rice hull extract they are confident that this is a very feasible alternative to the costly sesamol product. Problems with the extract were that it tended to darken the meat, and there was a foul odor present due to the volatile compounds that were not separated from the extract. Purification of the color pigments and extraction of the volatile compounds would solve both of these problems and allow rice hull extract to possibly replace sesamol as the leading preservative.