Health-Promoting Food Ingredients and Functional Food Processing

One of the greatest challenges food research is facing in this century lies in maintaining sustainable food production and at the same time delivering high quality food products with an added functionality to prevent life-style related diseases such as, cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke. Functional foods that contain bioactive components may provide desirable health benefits beyond basic nutrition and play important roles in the prevention of life-style related diseases. Polyphenols and carotenoids are plant secondary metabolites which are well recognized as natural antioxidants linked to the reduction of the development and progression of life-style related diseases. This chapter focuses on healthpromoting food ingredients (polyphenols and carotenoids), food structure and functionality, and bioavailability of these bioactive ingredients, with examples on their commercial applications, namely on functional foods. Thereafter, in order to support successful development of health-promoting food ingredients, this chapter contributes to an understanding of the relationship between food structures, ingredient functionality, in relation to the breakdown of food structures in the gastrointestinal tract and its impact on the bioavailability of bioactive ingredients. The overview on food processing techniques and the processing of functional foods given here will elaborate novel delivery systems for functional food ingredients and their applications in food. Finally, this chapter concludes with microencapsulation techniques and examples of encapsulation of polyphenols and carotenoids; the physical structure of microencapsulated food ingredients and their impacts on food sensorial properties; yielding an outline on the controlled release of encapsulated bioactive compounds in food products.