New insights of natural antioxidants in foods

NAZARENO M. A.; CHAILLOU, L.L.; GONZÁLEZ E. A.

Multidisciplinary Approaches on Food Science and Nutrition for the XXI Century

Research Signpost. Transworld Research Network.

Lugar: Kerala; Año: 2011; p. 91 - 112

Since ancient times, preserving food for long time has been a great concern. Sun drying, smoking, cooking, externally covering with fat to avoid oxygen deleterious action and addition of herbs and spices are the practices most frequently used since then. The development and progress of food science and technology have improved these traditional methods. Besides, new procedures have also arisen as the addition of preservative substances mainly from synthetic origin. The safety of such substances has increasingly been questioned by consumers and, the request of foods elaborated with lower contents of artificial substances is continuously rising. This trend of the market forces industrial producers and researchers to revise and upgrade the old practices looking for alternatives from natural sources to accomplish this function. Among the deterioration processes, oxidation reactions constitute a serious aspect in food conservation because they cause a partial or total loss in the nutritional value of a food by degradation of its vitamins, essential fatty acids, aminoacids and enzymes, as well as alterations in its sensorial properties yielding oxidized products that may even be toxic. In the last decades, numerous scientific studies have reported that a great variety of natural substances present the ability of retarding, decreasing or inhibiting the oxidative processes. These antioxidant substances have been, and still are, the targets of a huge amount of research reports dealing with their reactivity in different mechanisms towards several oxidant species, their occurrence in nature, their health beneficial effects and, more recently, about their uses as protective additives against oxidative damage in processed food.