FORGET apples; it may soon be a case of a corncob a day keeping the doctor away — or at least the optometrist — if Queensland food scientist Tim O’Hare has his say.
A breakthrough in the development of new sweet corn varieties by Dr O’Hare at the University of Queensland has seen the humble corncob transformed this year into a health food for Australia’s ageing population.
Dr O’Hare has succeeded in breeding a new type of sweet corn known as SuperGold that contains seven times the amount of the colour pigment zeaxanthin normally found in corn varieties.
Orange zeaxanthin is a natural vegetable pigment that, after being absorbed by the body, collects at the back of the eye’s retina and protects the sensitive macula from harmful blue light and corrosive damage.
Macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness and vision loss in Australia, with one in seven people older than 50 — one million people — showing some evidence of degeneration.
Leading macular degeneration specialist Beatrix Feigl, from Queensland’s University of Technology, said despite a genetic response component it was increasingly being confirmed in experiments that the consumption of high levels of zeaxanthin pigment supplements was an effective way of protecting against advanced eye disease.
“It’s not conclusive yet but if it was my mother or someone older and eye tests showed their pigment levels were low, I would be suggesting they take some antioxidant supplements with added lutein or zeaxanthin,” Dr Feigl said. “That’s where this new sweet corn is very interesting; we now want to do some trials to see what happens to eye pigmentation levels when people eat this new SuperGold corn every day.”
Dr O’Hare hopes the new corn variety — bred using traditional cross-breeding techniques and natural variation rather than genetic engineering — will be available to farmers to grow and consumers to eat within the next two years.
With the human body unable to synthesise zeaxanthin — and surveys showing much of the population is deficient in the eye pigment — eating one cob of the new sweet corn cultivar daily will replace the need for artificial pills.
Besides its enriched medicinal pigment load, the new variety also has an unusual deep golden colour that distinguishes it from other existing yellow corn.
Dr O’Hare and Horticulture Australia, which used grower levies to fund his research, are confident the dark golden colour also has greater consumer appeal, likely to capture 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the local market within a few years.
Source: The Australian