A Mouthful of Bone Soup: Thinking Beyond the Taste and Nourishment
In early 2015, bone soup (or broth) became a trendy healthy food in the street of American metropolis like New York and Chicago. A steaming cup of bone soup is welcomed by health-and beauty-savvy women and men due to its growing belief as a tasty nourishment. General speaking bone soup can be rich in collagen while low in sodium and fat, if prepared by the skilful hands of chefs following a long hour cooking process. Coincidentally, the wide use and strong belief in the healing power of bone soup is well-documented in many other cultures including Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Israel.
However, it remained mysterious what in bone soup account for its nourishing benefits and how it does it. As a semi-transparent water-based liquid, the content of general nutrients in bone soup is obviously too little to take the lead. A comparison with milk is often given as an evidence for doubting bone soup is nothing more than a placebo effect.
Dr. Lijing Ke and his colleagues from the Food Nutrition Sciences Centre in Hangzhou, China, have worked on a rather different perspective, trying to tackle the challenge. Rather than measuring the classic dosage-effects relation between composition of pig bone soup, they took a close look at the colloidal nano-particles that are automatically generated with the natural bone compositions during a several-hour but gentle cooking. Those delicate nano-particles contain collagen, polysaccharides, fats and calcium. They were carefully isolated with sophisticated chromatographic method and got “swallow-up” by a kind of immune cells, called macrophages, from the mucosa of human mouth. With the nano-particles inside, the cells became a lot more robust to environmental oxidative stresses. Different from any nutrient compounds, the bone soup nano-particles can directly interact with immune cells along alimentary tract without being digested in advance, implying a possible new way of food-body interaction.
The nano-core bone soup may offer a lot more than a body-warming sip one would enjoy in a cold winter morning, and booster the immune system while shined the hair and nails. Grandma’s old soup recipe apparently gets some real reason to be learned, out of respect.
- Full text of the original research article could be found @ npj Science of Food 1, Article number: 3 (2017). doi:10.1038/s41538-017-0003-3