Seafood Impact
Now that the Christmas festivities are over surely you have heard people say: "we celebrated the entire XXXXX feasting". Change XXXXX for the festivity of choice.
It is a universal truth that human kind celebrate through feasting, as almost all cultures make of the act of communal feasting a manifestation of social integration. Food is a source of pleasure and therefore of emotional welfare although it is well known that the type of food affects our health.
The typical diet of Mediterranean countries includes olive oil, garden produce, fruit, cereals, legumes, moderate quantities of fish and meat. wine, lactic products and a low intake of eggs, red meat and sweet meats. This type of diet reduces the risk of overweight and its associated chronic illnesses.
The influence of food on health depends on its composition and for this reason a knowledge of the data referring to its composition is very necessary. These data figure on the nutrition labels and their display allows an improvement in the health of the population and the development of the country's food and agricultural sector.
However, the composition of food is not a fixed entity and may vary according to those factors subject to the improvements in the application of new developments in agriculture and cattle raising.
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On the other hand, the composition of much of the food we consume is little known, a fact that is especially true in the case of one of the basic components of the Mediterranean diet: fish and seafood.
Really, from the 1006 commercial species taken from the Species Catalogue of the Ministry of Food, Fishery and Agriculture in the composition tables only about 90 species are included with much of the data referring to the raw product.
The Ona Futura Foundation together with the Food Campus of the University of Barcelona and the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation have promoted the Seafood Impact Project which provides knowledge of the composition of further species of fish and seafood commonly consumed. It also provides a list of infrautilized species in the food biodiversity and, as the FAO indicates, in this way takes action in the preservation of the biodiversity.
As a first step the Ona Futura Foundation has contributed to the publication of the Standard Tables of Food Composition, a result of the wprk of the same research team responsibe for the Seafood Impact project edited by McGraw Hill.