Composition of foods, Australia

R. English

Mrs Ruth English is Chief Nutritionist, Commonwealth Department of Community Services and Health, PO Box 9848, Canberra, ACT 2601.

This paper continues the story about establishing a national data base on the nutrient content of the Australian food supply. At an earlier meeting held at the University of New South Wales (Greenfield & Wills 1981) I presented a paper Australian food tables — some glimpses into the past (English 1981). At that time the food analytical program for the current revision had just commenced and the paper detailed the history of the development of food composition data bases in this country. The present paper tells the story behind the present revision program at least up to the publication of the 1989 edition of Composition of foods, Australia (Cashel & others 1989).

1978 Working Party on Food Composition Data

The history of the revision program commenced in 1978 when the Working Party on Food Composition Data of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) was established and held its first meeting on 22 August 1978. Its terms of reference were: To draw up a plan for the central collection of data on food composition in Australia; to identify the nutrients and other food components (eg additives) for which data are to be collected and the form in which they should be recorded and distributed to the public; and, to identify analytical and research facilities which could participate in a collaborative survey of food composition by direct analysis. The membership of that Working Party comprised:

Professor RH Thorp (Chairman), Australian Federation of Consumer Organisations
Miss June Bullock, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
Dr Basil Hetzel, CSIRO Division of Human Nutrition
Mr Lesley Ion, Commonwealth Department of Health
Dr WG Murrell, CSIRO Division of Food Research
Mr John Neuhaus, Government Analyst (NSW)
Mr RC Norris, Australian Government Analytical Laboratory
Mrs Barbara Smith, SA College of Advanced Education
Professor Stewart Truswell, University of Sydney
Dr Ron Wills, University of NSW
Miss Margaret Corden (Secretary), Commonwealth Department of Health

The members made a number of recommendations including: the range of foods should be extended from the 1970 edition of the food tables and cover ethnic, processed and fast or take-away foods; a loose-leaf manual form of publication was desirable in which data on nutrients/foods would be grouped by page/section to facilitate updating; and, procedures to be taken to identify appropriate laboratories to participate in the analytical program.

1979 Working Party on Food Composition Data

In 1979, the Nutrition Committee of NHMRC reviewed the report of the Working Party and agreed to recommend the establishment of a steering committee to develop guidelines for the collection of food composition data; urged early appointments to the secretariat and technical positions recommended by the Working Party; and, requested that the Council give consideration to the allocation of funds for laboratory analysis.

The first milepost in the revision program was achieved in 1979. This was the establishment of a small Working Party to establish guidelines for the collection of dietary data. The first chairman of the Working Party was Professor Stewart Truswell 1979–1982. Dr Alan Johnson was Chairman from 1982 until his retirement in 1987. The current membership of the Working Party is:

Dr Ross Richards (Chairman), Materials Research Laboratory — Tasmania, Defence Science and Technology Organisation
Mr Wally Hauser, Australian Government Analytical Laboratory
Mr John Harris, Council of the Australian Food Technology Associations
Mrs Ruth English, Commonwealth Department of Community Services and Health
Ms Karen Cashel (Secretary), Commonwealth Department of Community Services and Health

The present amended terms of reference for the Working Party are to recommend to the Nutrition Committee on the program for the revision of Tables of composition of Australian foods, and to advise on the laboratory aspects of the program.

Programs since 1979

The work program for the current revision of the Australian food tables is composed of four components: the analytical program; the processing and validation of food composition data and preparation for publication; the establishment of the Australian Nutrient Data Bank to store and process data; and the development of the NUTTAB computer data base.

Analytical program

This program can be divided into two phases, the first being funded by the NHMRC and the second by the Department. Table 1 lists the food analytical programs commissioned by the Council between 1980 and 1984, together with the laboratories and investigators involved, and includes the additional grants made.

Funding for the analytical program was provided by the Council, on a yearly basis only. This meant a major application had to be made to the October Session of the Council each year for funding for the following year — a mountain of paper work!

At the end of 1984, the NHMRC decided the food analytical program was more appropriately funded by the Department than from the Medical Research Endowment Fund and funding was not approved for a program in 1985. However, after very considerable paperwork, the Department stepped into the breach and since 1986 has provided a major funding source through a program grant for food analyses to be undertaken by the Australian Government Analytical Laboratory. To date the Department has provided $400,000 for this program with an allocation of $220,000 in 1989–90, a total of $620,000. Work undertaken within the Department's program grant includes analyses of fish and fish products, cereals and cereal products, milk and milk products, processed fruits and vegetables, legumes, and eggs. The data for these foods will be included in future editions of Composition of foods, Australia.

Planning and supervising the food analytical program are very demanding of professional time as they involve developing a national sampling plan for foods to be analysed, supervising the food analytical program, reviewing food analytical methodology, completing administrative paper work for funding for each year's program, requisitioning the actual analytical work, and following up the work program and payment of accounts to acquit annual funds before the end of the financial year.

Nutrients analysed in the program include: water, protein and amino acids*, starch, sugars, total fats, fatty acids, cholesterol, sodium, potassium, iron, calcium, zinc, magnesium, phosphorus*, manganese*, copper*, retinol, carotenes, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin C, vitamin B₆*, vitamin B₁₂*, biotin* and dietary fibre* (*denotes analysed on a selected range of foods).

The list of nutrients has been further expanded to include a more complete range of minerals and vitamins in current and future analytical programs.

Validation and processing of data for publication

Major tasks associated with this process commence when the raw data from the laboratory are received in the Department and they are described in detail by Cashel (1990). For this task, a major administrative problem has been obtaining adequate staff resources to expedite the work.

Australian Nutrient Data Bank

The establishment by the Department of the Australian Nutrient Data Bank (ANDB) has certainly expedited the storage, access to, validation and processing of nutrient data both for NUTTAB (Commonwealth Department of Community Services & Health 1987) and the publication of Composition of foods, Australia. The development of the ANDB has covered a five year period with significant input from two nutritionists, Karen Cashel and Janine Lewis, as well as computer scientists from the Information Services area of the Department. The first prototype, designed and tested in late 1985, proved to be user-unfriendly and the system was then redesigned with modified objectives. The present system has been up and running for two years now but with changes to mainframe computer systems in the Department, the ANDB now requires major modifications to adapt to the new systems and a case can always be made for extensions to the system.

The ANDB provides for the storage and retrieval of all information relating to food analytical data (Carmody 1987). Data are stored on the specifics of the food, its sampling, handling and preparation, the laboratory, the analytical methods used and the use of the analysis in generating representative data for the nutrient composition of a food. The system provides several advantages. The revised tables Composition of foods, Australia are prepared direct from the computer. This allows for a variety of presentation formats and an efficient means of changing or expanding these formats. Updating and expanding the range of both food items and nutrients are limited only by the capacity of the computer, and specialised needs for information can be met.

NUTTAB

Another project associated with the revision program of the food tables and the establishment of the ANDB has been the release in late 1987 of a computer data base NUTTAB providing nutrient composition data on a range of items, covering all major food groups. This data base was released to facilitate the use of Australian food composition values and to encourage the use of a common tool in dietary analysis in Australia.

The 1987 edition of NUTTAB was based on the food composition tables developed to analyse the diets in the 1983 national dietary survey of adults (English & others 1987) and the 1985 national dietary survey of schoolchildren (English & others 1989). This edition comprised 50 percent Australian data with the balance being modified data from the British food tables (Paul & Southgate 1978).

There have been two updates of NUTTAB, in 1988 and 1989 (Commonwealth Department of Community Services & Health 1989). With updating, there is an increase in the proportion of date based on the current food analytical program. The latest edition now contains some 67 percent of Australian data.

Table 1. Commissioned food analytical program

Composition of foods, Australia

The most visible evidence of the progress made by the national program is the new publication Composition of foods, Australia (Cashel & others 1989). This publication provides nutrient data on the food programs commissioned and reported to mid-1987, namely, fruit, vegetables, meats, poultry, offal, take-away and savoury snack products.

The loose-leaf format provides a one page per food overview of the proximate, vitamin and mineral content of the food both per 100 g edible portion and per defined food measure. It also provides a number of specialised appendices eg on fatty acids, sugars, amino acids, organic acids.

It is proposed that the initial edition of Composition of foods, Australia will be supplemented by approximately annual issues of further data. These will be mainly additions of new foods. Currently data from the fish and cereal programs are being prepared for release in 1990. However, revisions of updates of food items included in the 1989 issue may be included as new formats or special appendices as requested by users. In fact, consideration is already being given to the minimum information needed to update the data on meats in the near future.

With each new edition of Composition of foods, Australia it is proposed to update NUTTAB so that within the next two or three editions, this data base will comprise all Australian data. Other proposed tasks include the long overdue revision of the booklet of simplified food composition tables and development of a reference publication on serving sizes of Australian foods. Whether these proposals come to fruition will be very dependent on the monetary and staff resources made available to the Section to continue this program. It should be noted however, that to this time it is estimated that the cost of analyses and the establishment of the ANDB alone is approximately $1,550,000.

Concluding remarks

Up to 1981 I had been an onlooker as various editions and reprints of the Tables of composition of Australian foods (Thomas & Corden 1970) had been prepared in the Nutrition Section prior to 1979 and had appreciated the demanding and unenviable nature of the task. For the 1989 edition of Composition of foods, Australia and NUTTAB in which I have been directly involved I would like to pay tribute to the officers who have worked in the Nutrition Section on the day to day detail of this enormous task, Karen Cashel and Janine Lewis with able clerical support from Kerry Pearce.

Acknowledgments to the many people associated with the program appear in the publication Composition of foods, Australia, notably the members of the Nutrition Committee and Working Party on Food Composition Data, Dr Heather Greenfield, Professor Ron Wills, Mrs Sue Cassidy and Mr Geoff Hutchison. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Department and express my appreciation to these organisations for having faith in and for supporting the program to revise the national reference resource on the nutrient composition of the Australian food supply.

References

Carmody, J. 1987. Development of the Australian Nutrient Data Bank — computer aspects. English, RM & Lester, I (eds). Proceedings of the First OCEANIAFOODS Conference. Canberra: AGPS. 51–61.

Cashel, K, English, R & Lewis, J. 1989. Composition of foods, Australia. Canberra: AGPS.

Cashel, K. 1990. Compilation and scrutiny of food composition data. Food Australia 42: 8, 521–24/42: 521–24.

Commonwealth Department of Community Services & Health. 1987. NUTTAB87. Nutrient data table for use in Australia. Disk and tape format. Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Community Services & Health.

Commonwealth Department of Community Services & Health. 1989. NUTTAB89. Nutrient data table for use in Australia. Disk format. Canberra: AGPS.

English, R. 1981. Australian food tables – some glimpses into the past. Food Technol. Aust. 30: 103–63.

English, R, Cashel, K, Bennett, S, Berzins, J, Waters, A–M & Magnus, P. 1987. National dietary survey of adults: 1983. No. 2. Nutrient intakes. Canberra: AGPS.

English, R, Cashel, K, Lewis, J, Bennett, S, Berzins, J & Penm, R. 1989. National dietary survey of schoolchildren (aged 10–15 years): 1985. No. 2. Nutrient intakes. Canberra: AGPS.

Greenfield, H & Wills, RBH (eds). 1981. Tables of food composition: an Australian perspective. Food Technol. Aust. 33: 101–31.

Paul, AA & Southgate, DAT. 1978. The composition of foods. London: HMSO.

Thomas, S & Corden, M. 1970. Tables of composition of Australian foods. Canberra: AGPS.