Читать книгу Functional Foods - Группа авторов - Страница 47

As a logical outcome of the growing demands for healthy food items, the baked-goods industry has been commissioning R&D studies of functional foods and ingredients. In light of the advantageous effects that they have for human health, as mentioned above, cereals are used for designing new functional foods. Cereals are used as important alternatives when producing new food items such as breads, flat breads (pita breads), pan breads, breakfast cereals, cookies, cakes, pasta, and extruded snacks. Cereals can be used as prebiotics in the design of new prebiotic foods [8, 37]. The water-soluble fibers in cereals, including beta-glucans, pentosans, oligosaccharides, and resistant starches, act as a prebiotic medium. Starch or starch derivatives in cereals may be utilized as materials for the encapsulation of probiotics. These provide improvement of the stability of probiotics during processing, storage, and distribution and protection of probiotics from adverse conditions of the human gastrointestinal tract [37, 248, 273].