Natural Toxins in Foods

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Recommended: Chemistry of Food Essay

Food is filled with Natural chemical that are essential to our health, but some foods include potentially unsafe substance called natural toxins.

Most natural toxins happen naturally in just few foods and other natural toxins are produced when the food is damaged or when mould or fungi growth on the food,

First natural toxins produced by fungi: Example Mycotoxins.

Mycotoxins

The Mycotoxins are metabolites of mould which may infect foods, animal feeds and that happen to be toxic to human. The study of Mycotoxins, and the legislation associated with their control are based on them being considered as adulterant of foods and animal feeds.

Huge amounts of food are wasted every year due to which are attacked by toxic fungi or contaminated by fungal metabolic products. Such waste occurs most significantly in hotter countries where food shortages may already be a problem. One estimate (CAST, 2003) is that Mycotoxins affect a quarter of the world’s food crops, Including many basics food stuffs and animal feeds as well as crops. Mycotoxins are toxic chemical products formed by fungi that can grow on crops in the field or after harvest and the food that can be affected including cereals, nuts and dried fruits; coffee coco spices oilseeds and milk

Some of the Mycotoxins such as aflatoxins are among the most potent mutagenic and carcinogenic substances known (CAST, 2003). Mycotoxins are associated with many chronic health risks, including the induction of cancer , immune suppression, an digestive blood and nerve defects (CAST, 2003, Shepherd, 2006).Now there are more than 300 known Mycotoxins are found with widely different chemical structure and different mode of action and some target the kidney and liver and immune systems. Common Mycotoxins include aflatoxins, ochratoxins A, alkaloids, fumonisins and patulin

Mycotoxins are toxic secondary metabolites of fungi that are usually belongs to one of the three genus

1] Aspergillus Species, 2] Penicillium 3] Fusarium

Aspergillus Species:

Aflatoxins:

Aspergillus specious occurs in food as spoilage ago. They are very common in stored food products such as, Grain, nuts, and specious occur more frequently in tropical and subtropical then in moderate climates. Mycotoxins were brought to the attention of scientist in the yearly 1960s with the outbreak of turkey X disease which killed nearly 100,000 turkeys and other farm animals in England. The origin of the disease was traced from pea nut meal in the feed which was heavily contaminated with A. flavus. Analysis lately found that a group of fluorescent compound were responsible for the outbreak and named aflatoxins.

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