Safer Foods for All: Iranian Researcher Amin Mousavi Khaneghah on Advances in Food Science

You’ve been studying food safety for over 15 years. How did you originally get into this field?

Originally, I studied medicine, but in the second year, I dropped it because I got into food technologies and related research, particularly in meat and meat products. I got my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in food sciences at the Islamic Azad University in my home country of Iran. 

After that, I went to Brazil, where I defended my PhD at the State University of Campinas under the supervision of Prof. Anderson Sant’Ana, one of the most established specialists in food safety. I spent ten years in Brazil. In that time, I branched out my collaborations, deepened my research, and wrote review papers. I was particularly interested in mycotoxins and food contamination. 

This wasn’t easy for me: sometimes, I had to work 17-hour days for weeks. But it was very rewarding. As a result, my colleagues and I published around 600 papers in high-impact journals, including The Lancet and Nature. 

What excites you most about your research?

For me, food safety is one of the most important, engaging, and inexhaustible topics. It lies at the intersection of various scientific fields – medicine, pharmacology, ecology, and food engineering. I specialize in food toxicology and study how foods become contaminated with heavy metals, pesticides, and mycotoxins (types of mold toxins), as well as how to prevent this contamination or disinfect food to make it safe to consume again. For me, this is a matter of personal responsibility. Food safety specialists are akin to doctors – they also ensure people’s safety, but on a larger scale. While a doctor may see several dozen patients during one shift, I, through my work, “communicate” with hundreds of thousands of people, and my mistake could be fatal to someone.

We hear a lot about food safety these days. What does that term encompass?

If we are talking about the accessibility or availability of food, we are talking about food security. Around 8 billion people inhabit the Earth right now, and according to the WHO, around 733 million people are facing hunger – that’s about one in eleven people. 

The next issue is the safety of the food itself. Imagine you had a lovely dinner at a restaurant, and the next day, someone asks you, “So, how was the food?” If you enjoyed it, you would probably say it was delicious. And if nothing happened to you the following day, you might respond that the food was fresh and safe. But can we really be sure about that? What if the food contained metals, pesticides, or mycotoxins? The naked eye cannot detect these effects, which do not manifest immediately, yet they can accumulate in the body and lead to serious consequences. This is also a problem that needs to be addressed.

Finally, another issue affecting food safety is climate change. Weather changes impact not only plants and animals but can also increase the spread of diseases caused by fungi. Over time, these fungi may also become more resistant to treatments.

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It’s more or less clear how to prevent infections. But can we do something with products that have already been contaminated?

Our first instinct would be to throw them away. But as I’ve mentioned, the world's population is facing food shortages, so we can’t just waste food like that. Feeding it to livestock is also not an option, as we could end up catching the infection through the milk or meat. However, it is possible to disinfect the food and make it safe for consumption again.

Several common disinfection methods exist. One of the most straightforward and understandable ones is the physical method. For example, simply boiling milk is enough to avoid the risk of contracting bacteria that may be present in it.

Another method involves treating food with chemicals that can destroy or reduce the toxicity of fungi. However, there is a risk that these reagents may remain in the food, making this method unpopular in the industry.

And what do you focus on? Can you talk about some of the results of your work?

The best outcome can be achieved with biological treatments involving microorganisms. We use beneficial microorganisms, such as lactic acid bacteria, beneficial molds, or yeasts. They produce enzymes that bind mycotoxins to the surfaces of cells, allowing the contaminants to be removed from food. To ensure the result, we combine biological technology with other methods. For example, we first ferment the products to reduce the level of contaminants to a certain threshold. Then we irradiate them with ionizing radiation to break down the mycotoxin structure.

How would you say the field of food safety has changed over the past decade?

Let me use an example. Let’s say you wish to know which programming language you should learn – naturally, you’d go to an IT expert. However, if you were to wonder what products you can eat to support your immune system, you would be inundated with all kinds of answers, some absurd. I remember how during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was rumored that lemon and ginger help fight off the virus. Consumers rushed to buy these products, even though their effect wasn’t proven. 

Food security wasn’t always popular, but things have changed. There is a lot of information going around, and many people turn to it, consume it, and become armchair experts, sharing their experiences that are unsupported by relevant education or evidential proof. What’s worse, they can fool even academics, like my family. My dad once asked me if ginger tea could help with muscle pain. My first reply was, “Dad, are you being serious?”

Scientists also need to change their communication strategy. In the past, we interacted and exchanged knowledge only among ourselves. Now, we interact a lot with society. To be heard, we must explain many things more clearly and simply.

There are other challenges as well, such as the diversity of mycotoxins. Previously, a specific type of bacteria or mold was only well-known in a particular region, and people knew how to combat it effectively. However, global trade is changing. Many products with unknown toxins are arriving in Russia and many other countries. We have yet to develop effective methods for their purification.

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Last May, you joined the ITMO Fellowship program. Why did you decide to participate in it? What kind of research are you planning to do here?

I was a speaker at the international conference BIOCON 2023, where I met Mikhail Kurushkin, the dean of ITMO’s Faculty of Biotechnologies. He told me about the university and the opportunity to open my lab here, and I became very interested. That’s why, despite any obstacles, I flew here from Warsaw and settled in St. Petersburg. 

This year, I am the scientific supervisor of BIOCON 2024, and I’m helping the chair with inviting speakers to the conference. Among them is Prof. Seid Mahdi Jafari from Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, who specializes in nanosystems for delivering microelements to the human body, and Dr. Rana Muhammad Aadil, an associate professor in non-thermal treatment of produce at the University of Agriculture Faisalabad. They were both named Highly Cited Researchers in 2023 by Web of Science.

Moreover, my team and I have applied to ITMO’s open call for projects within the 2030 Development Strategy. If we win, we will open a frontier AI and food safety laboratory. We want to apply AI models to analyze pathogens and food contaminants and predict biohazards.