Exploitation of minor crops for the production of functional foods

Andrea Brunori – ENEA

ETP Food for Life: Brokerage EventBrussels, 22 November 2011

Background

• Nowadays the food market is offering the consumers trendy aliments rich in fat, refined wheat flours and sugars. Leading to what in the U.S.A. has been defined as “Toxic Food Environment”.

• Indeed, the consumption of these foods promotes high glycaemic indices and high blood cholesterol levels, physiological conditions that may foster health problems such as heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes and cancer.

• An opportunity to develop foods that may mitigate against these threats is offered by some minor crops (oat, millet and buckwheat) thanks to the wealth of health beneficial compounds present in the grain, known to effectively reduce cholesterol levels and favour lower postprandial glycaemic indices.

The research idea

• The present proposal relies on the introduction of effective amounts of health beneficial compounds by supplementing the recipes of traditional staples with various proportions of wholemeal of minor crops grain.

• Tradition and innovation can thus give rise to a novel class of certified functional foods.

• To this, the involvement and co-operation of scientists belonging to different disciplines (genetics, agronomy, molecular biology, food technology, chemistry, nutrition, medicine) and technologists of food industry is required.

• This way, a chance is offered to those who want to embrace the philosophy “ let food be your medicine and medicine be your food”, including the growing “Slow Food” people.

• Additionally, food producers will be granted with scientific evidence to support their health claims, to further promote commercialisation.

Results achieved to date

• At present preliminary attempts have been carried out in collaboration with a few Italian SME aiming at the production of rutin (one of the most active health beneficial natural compound) enriched biscuits, bread and pasta taking advantage of buckwheat wholemeal of both common and tartary species.

• The best results have been achieved with biscuits. Excellent crumb structure and palatability were maintained. What more, practically all the rutin was recovered and 40 mg, an effective amount according to the approach of preventive nutrition, of this compound was available by the consumption of 4 biscuits (about 60 g).

Buckwheat products

• In the case of bread the use of 20% buckwheat wholemeal negatively affected loaf volume implying that efforts are to be dedicated to improve this quality parameter. Likely the use of strong flour needs to be adopted.

• A special pasta “orecchiette” typical of the Region of Puglia (Southern Italy) was prepared including up to 30% buckwheat wholemeal. Surprisingly no negative effect was apparent on the process of pasta formation and cocking properties.

Limitations to overcome

• Both bread and pasta production involve the step of dough formation and in case of bread a period of few hours of leavening is required.

• Apparently, rutin degrading enzymes are present in tartary wholemeal so that only quercetin is recovered in these products. However, heat treatment of the wholemeal is reported to overcome this problem.

Impact

• It can confidently be envisaged a positive impact on the way food technologists formulate food at both scientific and industrial level while attaining the development of new health beneficial products stemming from improved traditional foods.

• Providing an effective tool for the wellbeing maintenance in a natural way, the newly created certified functional foods are expected to meet the favour of the consumers granting enormous market opportunities.