Project Details
Description
A high intake of fats, particularly saturated fatty acids, is closely associated with health risks such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and cardiovascular diseases. Recent national studies on US adult consumers showed that the intake of saturated fatty acids remained above 10% of energy, which is higher than the recommended level by WHO and FAO. It is essential to provide low-fat or fat-free food products to keep consumers healthy. Fat texturizing agents can act like fat but supply fewer calories and pose no or little health risks. In the food industry, fat texturizing agents are added to processed food products, including processed meat, meat analogues, fried foods, baked foods, dairy products, frozen and refrigerated foods, and snacks to provide consumers with the desired mouthfeel. Traditional fat texturizing agents receive an increasing expression of concerns about nutrition, health, and food sustainability as they are produced using carbohydrates, fatty acids, or vegetable oils. Protein-based fat texturizing agents is the new trend, but they also carry drawbacks that limit their development and applications. The primary disadvantage is that plant-based fat texturizers cannot tolerate cold-temperature and high-temperature processing. The second drawback is their low flexibility in the complex food matrix where polar and non-polar components co-exist. There are also limited techniques for producing high-quality protein-based fat texturizing agents, considering that the current techniques rely heavily on mechanical processing. Unlike mechanical processing, enzymes catalyze chemical reactions with high specificity under mild reaction conditions with low energy consumption. Thus, we foresee the urgent need to discover novel protein-based fat texturizing agents with superior qualities via novel and clean enzymatic manufacturing techniques.We propose to use proteins from pulse crops, e.g., dry peas, lentils, and chickpeas, to create novel fat texturizing agents. Pulses are massively produced in the US and are expected to play a vital role in addressing food security, nutrition, health, and sustainability in the immediate and foreseeable future. Pulse proteins will be modified by protease enzymes to improve their functionalities to enable them to function as fat texturizing agents. To improve their tolerance to cold-temperature and high-temperature processing, we are inspired by nature, where naturally occurring transglutaminase enzymes can act to combine different proteins in living organisms for a plethora of biological functions, and the cross-linked proteins show improved stability. We, therefore, will further modify the proteins via transglutaminase catalysis. The novel pulse protein-based hydrogels will be investigated for their cold-/heat-tolerance as fat texturizing agents in a case study in meat analogue products. Overall, this project is bioinspired by biocatalysis in nature, aiming to discover novel protein-based hydrogels as new fat texturizing agents for healthy processed foods. The pulse protein hydrogels discovered in this project as new texturizing agents will meet the current needs of low-fat, low-calorie foods and good texture for frozen and thermally processed foods. In addition, the new manufacturing technique is consistent with the clean production and sustainability of agri-food systems.
Status | Active |
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Effective start/end date | 8/1/23 → 7/31/27 |
Funding
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture: $599,000.00
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