Current Opinion in Food Science最新文献

Ohmic heating (OH) has emerged as a promising technology with proven effectiveness in liquid samples, but its application to solid foods, particularly meat products, presents challenges. This review delves into recent findings regarding how OH impacts meat products’ structural, functional, and technological aspects, examining its application’s primary benefits and drawbacks and highlighting its significance as an economically sustainable alternative for the industry. Despite electrode-related complexities, ohmic thawing shows potential benefits, offering faster thawing times and lower energy consumption. In meat, ohmic cooking is an innovative technology for low-temperature cooking, positively impacting microstructural and sensory properties. Electrical conductivity influences various aspects, including the denaturation of myofibrillar proteins. While OH exhibits notable advantages in energy efficiency and food safety, challenges such as initial investment costs, uneven heating, and potential metal contamination need consideration. Ongoing research is crucial for expanding OH applications and understanding its effects on a broader range of products beyond beef, chicken, and pork. Thus, this emerging technology demonstrates notable benefits, including reduced processing times, enhanced efficiency, and improved sustainability in the food industry.

Functional food development faces a considerable hurdle due to the poor bioavailability of incorporated bioactive compounds, which are caused by poor aqueous solubility, rapid release, low circulation time, physical and chemical instability, and cytotoxicity of bioactive compounds. Encapsulation emerges as a pivotal strategy to address this challenge by protecting bioactives. Protein as a wall material for encapsulation plays a significant role due to its biocompatibility, non-toxicity, surface activity, amphiphilic nature, and diverse range of functional groups. Researchers are currently exploring the co-encapsulation of multiple compounds to earn synergistic health benefits, enhanced functionality, and cost-effectiveness but face several challenges due to the diverse solubilities and chemical properties of bioactives. Proteins are crucial as encapsulation wall materials with their nutritional value and abundant availability. The diversity arising from the 20 different amino acids allows proteins to interact effectively with various compounds through various interactions. Emulsions, nano, micro solid particles, and gels are the most common protein-based fabricated systems used for encapsulation and co-encapsulation. However, as delivery systems, proteins face some drawbacks and challenges, such as rapid release and diffusion, low loading capacity, and instability in gastric environments. This review critically explores protein-based co-encapsulation studies, highlighting research gaps and proposing future directions in this field.

The field of consumer and sensory research increasingly recognises the importance of ecological validity in sensory data, emphasising the context in which food and beverages are evaluated. While initially focused on understanding consumer food acceptance, the application of these insights has broadened across sensory research. Simply including a digital context may not be automatically effective as it requires consideration of understanding the participant experience, its applications and the circumstances under which it can enhance ecological validity. This paper discusses key methodological developments for recreating digital contexts in traditional studies such as sensory and consumer food choices and acceptance, highlighting improvements for future food evaluation studies. It also explores recent advancements in extended reality research and its applications beyond traditional evaluations, including discussions of recent applications in behavioural science, education and healthcare.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has driven lasting effects on the daily lives of both the general public and the scientific research community. Globally, the pandemic’s influence has extended even into the realms of sensory and consumer science. Amidst this challenging time, significant innovations have emerged in sensory methodologies, leading to fundamental advances in our understanding of the chemical senses. Over the past four years, particularly notable progress has been made in remote sensory testing methodologies, global sensory research, and sensory nutrition. This article aims to synthesise and highlight key developments in sensory science stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

A reduction in meat consumption would be desirable to promote sustainable diets. Globally, meat consumption is still increasing, and the various meat alternatives introduced in recent years occupy only a small share of the meat market. Since technological solutions alone are not sufficient to reduce meat consumption, policy measures and interventions are discussed. We describe various measures that have been proposed to reduce meat consumption. Based on the evidence from the literature, some of these measures are unlikely to be effective (e.g. labeling) or acceptable to consumers (e.g. taxes). It will be important to focus on measures that are effective (e.g. nudging). However, since consumers tend to be resistant to fundamental changes in their diet, rapid transitions cannot be expected.

This paper emphasizes the importance of structured databases, visualization techniques, statistics, and mathematical models as milestones when developing predictive models of bacterial responses to food environments. Predictions generated by such models are vital in decision-making on food safety and quality issues. The paper suggests that while refinements, such as reparameterization, rescaling, and fine-tuning smoothness-characterizing parameters, are useful for numerical/statistical point of view, the result should not be considered as new models. It is proposed that novel predictive models should be linked to those widely accepted in related disciplines, such as biotechnology, systems biology, or biochemistry.

Food waste represents a growing global crisis equivalent to ∼1.3 billion tonnes/year. This review provides an overview of the potential of food waste as a carbon source for microbial upcycling using anaerobic digestion (AD) for bioenergy coupled with single cell protein (SCP) production. We estimate biogas potential from food waste to be sufficient to generate electricity for 26,500 UK households. Additionally, the concept of mixed communities is considered as an alternative to traditional pure culture fermentation for SCP, and a literature review of 82 genera for SCP from food waste and biogas is presented. Improvements in the understanding of microbial community structure and function are still required to improve reactor performance. Future research should focus on providing insight of the AD microbiome, considering the role of syntrophic relationships in reactor stability, alongside integrated whole systems sustainability assessment of microbial upcycling technologies.

Soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) catalyzes the conversion of epoxy fatty acids into diols. Epoxy fatty acids are signaling molecules that are involved in inflammation, regulation of the redox state, blood pressure, and pain perception, among other physiological functions. Downregulation of sEH activity in various cells has been used for the treatment and management of various cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. Thus, sEH inhibition is an emerging target against inflammation, oxidative stress, and their associated diseases. This paper discusses recent advances and future perspectives in sEH inhibition by extracts and compounds from food sources, including polyphenols, protein hydrolysates and peptides, protoalkaloids, triterpenoids, and fatty acids.

In the domain of food, fungi exhibit a dual role: while some enhance flavour and texture of food, others cause spoilage and contamination, posing risks to human health through mycotoxins. Fungi leave their unique chemical signature on the foods they colonise through the synthesis of primary and secondary metabolites. Metabolomics, focusing on the study of small molecules present in biological systems, provides insights into fungal metabolic processes and their impact on food quality and safety. This review explores the recent advancements in metabolomics for food mycology, highlighting its applications in understanding fungal interactions with food substrates. Moreover, future directions in this area are discussed.