Development of a national food composition database in Ukraine following EuroFIR and BaSeFood projects

Poster publicado em: BaSeFood Newsletter - Special Issue n.º7, October 2012 - Traditional Food International 2012, p. 35. ISBN: 978-88-902152-6-1

Introduction. Food composition databases (FCDB) are an important resource of nutritional composition data which is essential for the assessment of nutritional status, at individual, regional and international levels. The European Food Information Resource (EuroFIR) is the world-leading European Network of Excellence on Food Composition Databank systems. This project aimed to develop and integrate a comprehensive, coherent and validated databank providing a single, authoritative source of food composition data in Europe. EuroFIR has designed and implemented a process for the identification, prioritisation, collection and analyses of traditional foods, using a common methodology for European countries. These approaches have been further extended in BaSeFood project which aims to promote sustainable development and exploitation of traditional foods of plant origin containing emerging bioactive compounds with putative health effects in the Black Sea region. The aim of this work is to contribute for a new FCDB in Ukraine based on these quality standards with the compilation of a selected range of traditional foods. Results. Following these methodologies, 59 traditional foods were prioritised and full documented including information on food description, sampling plan, sample handling, component identification, method specification, value and quality assessment. This information was collected for each of the traditional foods for further inclusion in the Ukrainian national food composition database. From these, 6 foods (rye bread, Ukrainian red borsch with beets, Transcarpathian green borsch with sorel, pomazanka with dill and garlic, sauerkraut and roasted sunflower seeds) were analysed for nutritional composition. The following components: moisture, ash, total nitrogen (for protein), total fat, individual fatty acids, starch, total sugars and dietary fibre, vitamins, minerals and trace elements were quantified for each food. Following a training, Ukrainian compilers have earned the skills to carry out the compilation of traditional foods with EuroFIR requirements. A total of 59 Ukrainian traditional foods have been indexed according to LanguaL Thesaurus system (http//www.langual.org/). LanguaL provides an international framework for food description using a system of controlled vocabularies. Conclusions. The EuroFIR and BaSeFood standardised procedures have been implemented in a pilot study to be further extended to other foods for development of a Ukrainian FCDB.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n.º 227118.