The Next-Best to Fresh

Grad Student Profile

“If the population doesn’t consume a diverse diet, either because they don’t have access by location or cost, or because they don’t like the taste, they really need other ways of supplementing daily needs for vitamins and minerals, because that’s what we really need for our body to work in a functional way and to avoid diseases.”

Blueberry research embraces processing to deliver phytochemical punch in model study for human health

By Juliana Proffitt McCully

When Monique Carvalho Templeton thinks of “processed food,” she isn’t talking about junk with a chemical-laden label, but an optimized way to deliver the health benefits of anti-inflammatory phytochemicals to populations that face fresh-food barriers.

Carvalho Templeton recently completed a PhD in nutrition science at the Plants for Human Health Institute, where her doctoral research centered on a pilot study at the intersection of health and access.

It’s increasingly clear, she says, that eating fruits and vegetables can be protective against inflammation and chronic diseases such cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

“Research has shown great benefits coming from compounds such as phytonutrients, including flavonoids, which come in very high amounts in blueberries,” Carvalho Templeton says. “If the population doesn’t consume a diverse diet, either because they don’t have access by location or cost, or because they don’t like the taste, they really need other ways of consuming phytonutrients and supplementing daily needs for vitamins and minerals, because that’s what is essential for our body to work in a functional way and to avoid diseases.”

The BAM Study enrolled participants to learn more about how the body absorbs polyphenols in fresh blueberries compared to a minimally processed blueberry protein bar. The focus was to build a model for studying how phytochemicals in fruits are used and eliminated by the body.

What is “Processed”?

Processed means a food is taken in its whole form and changed in some way. Maybe it’s flash-frozen, portioned or packaged for convenience, or maybe other ingredients have been added to create a different food. Cooking from scratch is one way to process food, while microwaveable foods are pre-processed for consumption, for example.

Processed food can be less healthy than consuming whole foods, but Carvalho Templeton’s work looks to see how minimal processing could offer an alternative to fresh that’s tasty, convenient and preserved to make nutritionally beneficial foods more readily available, and to see if Americans in general can consume more of the daily recommendation of fruits and vegetables.

Fresh is still best, Carvalho Templeton says, but there’s evidence a minimally processed blueberry protein bar offers a similar benefit of bioavailable polyphenols. More research is needed to evaluate processing methods, but she is encouraged this could be a way to get nutritious foods to people who need them most. It also paves the way to study other gaps in nutrition, such as iron deficiency in women.

“I’ve always loved how our body is so amazingly designed to work and metabolize the food we eat to provide us with energy and to protect our body from foreign organisms.”

Carvalho Templeton completed a master’s degree at the University of Campinas, Brazil, in 2018, and developed a method to control ascorbic acid via near-infrared spectroscopy and analyzing the bio-accessibility of iron and zinc in powdered soft drinks.

“That’s where my interest arose,” she says. “Once I started reading, it morphed more in depth to how our body metabolizes what we eat and how we can supply some deficiencies and preventative care for life.”

But it was the phytochemicals that really piqued her interest and brought her to NC State. When she began searching for Ph.D. opportunities to study specific chemical compounds and their potential health benefits, she emailed professors around the world.

“This issue alone, there’s just little research on it, and a lot more should be done,” Carvalho Templeton says. “So when (professor and advisor) Colin Kay replied and presented the (BAM) project, I just loved it! At the time, I was just doing some in-vitro assays for bioaccessibility, so the opportunity to work with people and look into the bioavailability of phytochemicals really caught my attention.”

Carvalho Templeton says the experience was “even better than I expected, especially the clinical aspect of the project.” She also appreciated the diversity of tasks involved, including opportunities in the lab, computer work, writing, publications and face-to-face interaction with participants.

Carvalho Templeton finished her doctoral work in August and will graduate in December, but she has already begun a career informed by her NC State experience when she joined a Richmond-based pharmaceutical group at the nexus of health and research, helping others to do the kind of work she did with blueberries.

“They are in the pharmaceutical field, but they perform a lot of assays that I was doing through my Ph.D., validating ways of quantifying compounds in blood or urine,” she says. “I loved the idea of moving forward into more laboratory practices, more analytical practices like this. They support health improvement and wellness, which is something that I’m passionate about.”

Carvalho Templeton sees her work as a path to future pharmaceuticals and more, everything from precision nutrition to development of food products that are optimized for the nutrients and phytonutrients that they contain and can be well-absorbed by the body.

“They have shown some ways of decreasing biomarkers from health conditions, such as cancer, and the development of a functional food would be a game changer,” she says. “I can see a vast area that’s supercorrelated with nutrition and pharmaceuticals – a lot of what I do is collaborate with researchers in all different fields, and we would really need to work together to achieve goals like that, but there is a lot more research to be done.”