Cold plasma has been developed to reduce microbial contamination and to improve safety of food and medical products. In addition, the technology can be used in the manufacture of sausages without addition of nitrite. To be applied in food industry commercially, the new technology should be safe and efficient. However, toxicological test of plasma-treated food is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the mutagenicity and immune toxicity of the meat products cured with plasma-treated water (PTW) as a nitrite source. Emulsion sausages were prepared with no nitrite (control), sodium nitrite (SCS), and PTW (SCP). For a mutagenicity test, the Ames test was performed with the sausage samples. For immune toxicity test, 8-wk-old female Balb/c mice were given free access to the sausages in order to evaluate the tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α level. As a result, no mutagenicity was detected in the sausages by the Ames test. The serum TNF-α values were less than 10 pg/mL in mice after feeding control and treated samples for 32 d, indicating that no inflammatory response was occurred by feeding the sausages made by PTW. Therefore, the present study opens the possibility of using plasma-treated water as a nitrite source without any toxicity.
Keywords: immune toxicity; mutagenicity; nitrite; plasma; sausage.