Discovery of resveratrol

The history of resveratrol, the active ingredient in red grapes, peanuts, berries, and several other food plants, indirectly dates to the Ayurveda, the ancient India treatise on the science of longevity.

Resveratrol was first isolated by Takaoka in the 1940 as a constituent of the roots of white hellebore.

Resveratol

Later, Nonomura isolated resveratrol from Japanese knotweed of Polygonum cuspidatum, called Ko-jo-kon in Japanese in 1963.

In 1992, the presence of resveratrol was reported in red wines and recognized as a biological active compound by Siemann and Creasy.  A number of epidemiological studies suggested that the moderate consumption of red wine by French and other Mediterranean population was connected with the reduced incidence of cardiovascular disease, despite high-fat diet, little exercise and widespread smoking.

The groups of Howitz and Sinclair from Harvard Medical School reported in 2003 in the journal Nature that resveratrol significantly extends the lifespan of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Discovery of resveratrol

Hydrogenation process in history

Hydrogenation is conversion process of liquid oils to semi-hard fats by the addition of hydrogen to the unsaturated double bonds; used for margarines and shortenings intend for bakery products.

The earliest hydrogenation is that of platinum catalyzed addition of hydrogen to oxygen in the Dobereiner’s lamp, a device commercialized as early as 1823.

The French chemist Paul Sabatier is considered the father of the hydrogenation process. In P. Sabatier’s hydrogenation method a mixture of hydrogen and the vapor of an organic compound was passed over a metallic catalyst, normally finely divided nickel. In 1902 a German patent was granted for Sabatier’s invention.

William Norman, an English chemist, invented a method of saturating unsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids thus preventing them from turning rancid.

In 1903 Norman patented the hydrogenation process. He patented the simple process of bubbling hydrogen through heated oil in which finely divided nickel was suspended.

It was then around 1911 that the artificial fat business actually began to take off. These artificial fats did not spoil and turn rancid as unrefrigerated natural products do.

From about 1913 Frederick Bergius worked out methods of hydrogenating substances by reaction with hydrogen under great pressure and without a metallic catalyst.

In 1922 Joseph L. Rosefield of the Rosefield Packing Company of Alameda, California, applied these principles to peanut butter. He developed a process to prevent oil separation and spoilage in peanut butter.
Hydrogenation process in history

History of pasteurization

Pasteurization is the named for the French scientist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). Although he first experimented with this process in 1862, pasteurization was not put to use until the early twentieth century. 

During the 1800s, human caught typhoid and tuberculosis from tainted milk. Diaries in the 1800s were extremely unsanitary and so were the dairy workers.

In 1857, Louis Pasteur discovered that souring in milk could be delayed by heating milk to between 122 and 142°F, although it was not firmly established that causative agents of spoilage and disease were microorganisms until later in that century.

In 1863, he developed a method of treating wine by heating it to kill the microorganisms that caused the wine to become vinegar. The technique was soon applied to milk.

The first commercial pasteurization equipment was manufactured in Germany in 1882.

Pasteurization began in the United States as early as 1893, when private charity milk stations in New York City began to provide pasteurized milk to poor children through the city health department, a movement that spread to other cities. In 1930s, milk pasteurization became mandatory under U.S law.

New methods of purifying food have been developed, including cold pasteurization and electronic pasteurization. Both of these methods involve the use of ionizing radiation to destroy microorganisms.
History of pasteurization