Explain why the process of using salts andor sugars to cure

Explain why the process of using salts (and/or sugars) to cure meats such as ham has been used for centuries to preserve meats. In your answer correctly use the terms osmosis, diffusion, and hypertonic solution.

Solution

In case of hypotonic solution, solvent enters into the bacterial cells leading to cell swelling may lead to cell burst due to higher hydrostatic pressure inside the cells. Therefore, normally, meat is composed of protein and many microbial species can infect this meat protein finally causes protein degradation, so that often butchers use salt solution to mix with ham so that salt solution can easily “move via diffusion into the protein”. Now, microbial specie such as bacteria etc are hypotonic to the meat surface as a result in hyperonic salts solution makes bacteria to lose its fluids out the cell s via osmosis as per osmotic concentration gradient. Finally, this is leading to cell death of microbial species.

Slats hypertonic fluids on ham causes lyses of the bacterial cell wall & plasma membrane due to development of high osmotic pressure due to concentration difference between inside and outside medium in certain concentrated solutions. This is leading to exposure of internal contents to the outside medium finally arrest of cellular respiration result tin cell death. Gram-negative bacteria cells specifically have little resistance power to higher osmotic solutions. However, the cell wall cannot resist higher osmotic pressure when placed in osmotic solutions in both hypertonic & hypotonic solution result in disruption of lipopolyssacride layer & envelope finally leading to cell lysis.