Meat-eater's revenge: Using a part of beef tallow to lower cholesterol
By ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
April 17, 2006
When your car gets low on gas, water is not a cheaper way to fill up.
When you're out of sugar, it won't do much good to fill the sugar bowl with salt.
So why would somebody as logical as University of Nebraska researcher Tim Carr turn to beef tallow as a way to lower our cholesterol?
"I agree with you," responded this nutritional biochemist when it's suggested tallow is a bit hard to swallow as a proposed ingredient in improving the human diet.
"It seems a little counter-intuitive to eat beef fat to lower your cholesterol. But in fact, we're not feeding beef fat to people," he said.
What Carr, a 10-year veteran of the UNL faculty, has discovered over four years of research in an East Campus laboratory is that a combination of soybean extract and the stearic acid from beef tallow seem to have vast potential as a cholesterol-lowering food additive.
"While we use beef tallow as study material, there's nothing left that you would think of as beef fat by the time we're done," he said in an interview in his campus office.
"I see this clearly as a real value-added process. Beef tallow and soybeans are good examples of taking commodities that go into animal feed or low-value production and extracting all the goodies that might be of benefit to human health."
Carr's work reaches a crucial stage next month. That's when he joins MDS Pharma Services in Lincoln in trying to transfer to the human realm his success in trials that lowered LDL or "bad" cholesterol as much as 79 percent in hamsters.
A dietary supplement made up of the same ingredients will be provided to 16 human volunteers over four weeks. The other 16 people in the four-week trial will get a placebo.
If all goes according to plan, "we'll have the preliminary results by fall," he said.
And if the final results keep the green light lit, the product of years of research could be in food stores in two years.
"If you want to sell the product, it needs to work," he said, "so the human study is what we call proof of concept. And if all goes as expected, we should have a number of companies interested in putting in the product."
The university and Beef Products, Inc. of Dakota Dunes, S.D. have already signed an agreement aimed at commercializing Carr's findings and making another major market for BPI's meat trimmings.
BPI is the provider of ground beef to nation-wide restaurant chains and is billed as the world's leading manufacturer of boneless beef. The largest of its four plants is in South Sioux City and its management team is providing $500,000 to fund the human clinical study.
Just how big is BPI?
"If you are eating ground beef at home or at a quick service restaurant," said company spokesman Rich Jochum, "odds are that ground beef contains a significant amount of BPI lean beef trimmings."
In remarks reported by the university's news services, BPI founder Eldon Roth also touched on promising possibilities. "As the leading producer of high quality, stearic acid compound used in this process, BPI is the right partner to be working with Dr. Carr and UNL to further this research," Roth said.
A series of follow-up questions directed to Jochum produced a series of e-mail replies that further underscored the company's optimism about a partnership with UNL and about a new use from some 20 million pounds of tallow produced per week.
"We believe the healthy benefits of the product will create demand in the marketplace," Jochum said. "This compound is produced from products that are already naturally found in food products and will not require treatment as a drug."
Carr visualizes his additive being mixed in with such prepared products as margarine-like table spreads and also available in tablet form.
The effect of either means of ingestion is not to break down cholesterol, but to block it and carry it out of the body.
"Consequently, there are no toxic side effects with this at all, even in large doses."
Jochum called it "a very real possibility" that BPI would also use the soy-tallow additive with its own meat products.
If the human research bears out, said Carr at UNL, all that's left is to get the beef-soybean combination into the marketplace and to collect the royalties that go with a university patent.
Once that happens, "I think imagination is the only limit here."
journalstar.com
By ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
April 17, 2006
When your car gets low on gas, water is not a cheaper way to fill up.
When you're out of sugar, it won't do much good to fill the sugar bowl with salt.
So why would somebody as logical as University of Nebraska researcher Tim Carr turn to beef tallow as a way to lower our cholesterol?
"I agree with you," responded this nutritional biochemist when it's suggested tallow is a bit hard to swallow as a proposed ingredient in improving the human diet.
"It seems a little counter-intuitive to eat beef fat to lower your cholesterol. But in fact, we're not feeding beef fat to people," he said.
What Carr, a 10-year veteran of the UNL faculty, has discovered over four years of research in an East Campus laboratory is that a combination of soybean extract and the stearic acid from beef tallow seem to have vast potential as a cholesterol-lowering food additive.
"While we use beef tallow as study material, there's nothing left that you would think of as beef fat by the time we're done," he said in an interview in his campus office.
"I see this clearly as a real value-added process. Beef tallow and soybeans are good examples of taking commodities that go into animal feed or low-value production and extracting all the goodies that might be of benefit to human health."
Carr's work reaches a crucial stage next month. That's when he joins MDS Pharma Services in Lincoln in trying to transfer to the human realm his success in trials that lowered LDL or "bad" cholesterol as much as 79 percent in hamsters.
A dietary supplement made up of the same ingredients will be provided to 16 human volunteers over four weeks. The other 16 people in the four-week trial will get a placebo.
If all goes according to plan, "we'll have the preliminary results by fall," he said.
And if the final results keep the green light lit, the product of years of research could be in food stores in two years.
"If you want to sell the product, it needs to work," he said, "so the human study is what we call proof of concept. And if all goes as expected, we should have a number of companies interested in putting in the product."
The university and Beef Products, Inc. of Dakota Dunes, S.D. have already signed an agreement aimed at commercializing Carr's findings and making another major market for BPI's meat trimmings.
BPI is the provider of ground beef to nation-wide restaurant chains and is billed as the world's leading manufacturer of boneless beef. The largest of its four plants is in South Sioux City and its management team is providing $500,000 to fund the human clinical study.
Just how big is BPI?
"If you are eating ground beef at home or at a quick service restaurant," said company spokesman Rich Jochum, "odds are that ground beef contains a significant amount of BPI lean beef trimmings."
In remarks reported by the university's news services, BPI founder Eldon Roth also touched on promising possibilities. "As the leading producer of high quality, stearic acid compound used in this process, BPI is the right partner to be working with Dr. Carr and UNL to further this research," Roth said.
A series of follow-up questions directed to Jochum produced a series of e-mail replies that further underscored the company's optimism about a partnership with UNL and about a new use from some 20 million pounds of tallow produced per week.
"We believe the healthy benefits of the product will create demand in the marketplace," Jochum said. "This compound is produced from products that are already naturally found in food products and will not require treatment as a drug."
Carr visualizes his additive being mixed in with such prepared products as margarine-like table spreads and also available in tablet form.
The effect of either means of ingestion is not to break down cholesterol, but to block it and carry it out of the body.
"Consequently, there are no toxic side effects with this at all, even in large doses."
Jochum called it "a very real possibility" that BPI would also use the soy-tallow additive with its own meat products.
If the human research bears out, said Carr at UNL, all that's left is to get the beef-soybean combination into the marketplace and to collect the royalties that go with a university patent.
Once that happens, "I think imagination is the only limit here."
journalstar.com
