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Everyday foods may soon be able to carry medicines and supplements, or even take on your favorite color. As this ScienCentral News video explains, physicists are using nanotechnology to create tiny edible capsules that release their contents on demand.
Food For Thought
"Tea, earl grey, hot," commanded Captain Jean-Luc Picard aboard the starship Enterprise, and a steaming cup of tea would appear instantly in the futuristic food replicator on the wall. Having your food just the way you like it, in an instant, might not be just something from science fiction… but simply from science.
Nanotechnologists are working on adding ingredients that could one day "program" the contents of your cupboard, at a moment's notice, filling your pantry with, "Functional foods… to enhance its health value, its taste, its smell, its general quality," explains Harvard UniversityDavid Weitz. Using the same technique they might even make taking your medicines as easy eating a candy bar.
But, many Americans associate the phrase "artificial ingredients" with unhealthy eating habits, so Weitz's work might turn that notion upside down. "If you drink a milkshake, you look at it and worry that you're going to gain weight because it tastes so good. You might imagine something that would limit the ability of the body to absorb all the fat, or add a nutrient or enzyme that would improve the benefits of the milkshake so you wouldn't worry about the weight you are about to gain by drinking the tasty milkshake," he says.
As seen through a microscope - tiny, nano-sized particles assemble to make a colloidisome. image: David Weitz
With the idea of perhaps one day carrying active ingredients such as fat blockers, extra nutrients or even prescription medications within ordinary food, the resereachers set out to make tiny capsules that could carry substances like nutrients or medicines into the body. "We were trying to figure out a way to create these capsules to protect nutrients and valuable drug molecules in an environment where they'd be attacked and captured otherwise," says Weitz. When the capsules reached the desired location, the contents would be released slowly into the body.
As seen through a microscope - tiny, nano-sized particles assemble to make a colloidisome. image: David Weitz
With the idea of perhaps one day carrying active ingredients such as fat blockers, extra nutrients or even prescription medications within ordinary food, the resereachers set out to make tiny capsules that could carry substances like nutrients or medicines into the body. "We were trying to figure out a way to create these capsules to protect nutrients and valuable drug molecules in an environment where they'd be attacked and captured otherwise," says Weitz. When the capsules reached the desired location, the contents would be released slowly into the body.
The capsules, called "colloidosomes," are made of tiny particles just one-tenth the size of a human cell, that assemble themselves into a hollow, sturdy, elastic shell with holes. "We fabricate colloidosomes by taking small drops of water and immersing them in another fluid which has little particles in it. And the particles… stick to the surface of the water drop, and then we heat them up slightly to make a solid shell of particles around the water drop," Weitz explains. "By controlling the way we produce the little particles, we can adjust the little holes in the shell that allow small molecules to go in and out of this capsule." By adjusting the size of the holes they would be able to control how long it would take for the drug or nutrient inside to escape, "so we could control the release of these nutrients," he says.
While the food and drug administration is still deciding how best to regulate these so-called "functional foods," Weitz thinks they could hit supermarket shelves by the end of the decade.
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