- History
- Study items
- Designer food
- Interactions between food and the environment
- Chemical additives
- Composition
- Applications
- References
The food chemistry is the branch of chemistry that studies the chemicals that form the food composition, properties, chemical processes occurring in them and interactions of these substances with each other and the other components biological food.
This discipline also includes aspects related to the behavior of these substances during storage, processing, cooking, and even in the mouth and during digestion.
Food chemistry is part of a broader discipline such as food science, which also involves biology, microbiology and food engineering.
At its most fundamental, the basic chemistry of foods deals with the main components in foods such as water, carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and vitamins and minerals.
Food chemistry as it is known today is a relatively new discipline but whose scope, purposes and results are within everyone's reach.
History
The science of food as a scientific discipline was created in the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the important development of chemistry in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Lavoisier (1743-1794), French chemist, biologist, and economist, established the fundamental principles of combustion and organic analysis and made the first attempts to determine the elemental composition of alcohol, and the presence of organic acids in various fruits.
Scheele (1742-1786), a Swedish pharmacist, discovered glycerol and isolated citric and malic acids from various fruits.
Justus von Liebig (1801-1873), German chemist, classified food into three large groups (fats, proteins and carbohydrates), and devised a method to obtain meat extracts that was used throughout the world until the middle of the 20th century.
He also published in the second half of the 19th century, what appears to be the first book on food chemistry, Research on Food Chemistry.
Until the end of the 19th century, the development of analytical chemistry methods and advances in physiology and nutrition allowed us to deepen our knowledge of the main chemical components of food.
Another important step in this direction was the discovery of microorganisms and fermentation processes carried out by Louis Pasteur (1822-1895).
The expansion that characterized the Industrial Revolution and the changes from rural to urban societies altered food production and created public health problems due to frequently inappropriate hygienic conditions and to their adulteration and falsification.
This situation led to the birth of institutions with the purpose of controlling the composition of food. The importance that this discipline was gaining favored specialists in food chemistry and the establishment of agricultural experiment stations, food control laboratories, research institutions, and the foundation of scientific journals in the area of food chemistry..
Currently, the globalization of food consumption, the appearance of new raw materials, new technologies and new foods, coupled with the wide use of chemical products and a growing interest in the food-health relationship, poses new challenges for this discipline.
Study items
Food is a complex matrix made up of both biological and non-biological components. Therefore, the search for answers to aspects such as, for example, the texture, aroma, color and taste of food, entails the integration of scientific knowledge from other disciplines that would normally be separated.
For example, studying the chemistry of the chemical additives used for conservation purposes cannot be separated from the study of the microbiology of the microorganisms that may be present in a certain product.
The main elements that are currently the object of study and research in this discipline are:
Designer food
For more than three decades the food industry has made great efforts to reinvent food with the aim of lowering costs or promoting health.
Functional, probiotic, prebiotic, transgenic, organic foods are part of this trend.
Interactions between food and the environment
These cover aspects such as interactions between ingredients that make up a food, between food and packaging, or its stability against temperature, time or the environment.
Chemical additives
Only in recent years it is estimated that at least two to three thousand chemical substances, belonging to about forty categories based on their function, are added to food.
These additives can be extracted from natural sources, have a synthetic origin in order to give a substance with the same chemical characteristics of the natural product, or be synthetic compounds that do not exist naturally.
There is a wide field to research on compounds that improve the organoleptic characteristics of foods or increase their nutritional or functional value.
Composition
The improvement of laboratory methods and equipment allows a deeper understanding of food at the molecular level, better establishing its chemical nature and the specific functions of the molecules involved.
It is important to note that there are an innumerable variety of toxic substances in food:
- Own the metabolism of the natural animal or plant source.
- Products of decomposition by physical or chemical agents.
- Due to the action of pathogenic microorganisms.
- Other substances that may be present and result from an undesirable contact that contaminated you.
Applications
Among the most common examples of food chemistry in daily life there are two categories of products with high demand in the market, such as low-fat and low-sugar.
The former are the product of the use of a variety of substitutes made from the raw materials of the three groups: carbohydrates, proteins and fats.
Among them there are prepared protein derivatives, based on whey or from egg white and skim milk, derived from gelatins or gums (guar, carrageenan, xanthan). The purpose is to offer the same rheology and mouthfeel of fats, but with a lower calorie content.
Non-nutritive sweeteners can be natural or synthetic of a wide structural variety. Among the natural ones there are proteins and terpenes. Among synthetics, aspartame, twice as sweet as sucrose and derived from an amino acid, is the classic example.
References
- Alais, C., & Linden, G. (1990). Manual of biochemistry of foods. Barcelona: Masson.
- Cheftel, J., Cheftel, H., Besançon, P., & Desnuelle, P. (1986). Introduction à la biochimie et à la technologie des alimentants. Paris: Technique et Documentation
- Coultate, T. (1986). Foods. Zaragoza: Acribia.
- Gaman, P., & Sherrington, K. (1990). The science of food. Oxford, Eng.: Pergamon.
- Lasztity, R. (2018). FOOD CHEMISTRY (1st ed.). Budapest, Hungary: Lasztity Budapest University of Technology and Economics
- Marcano D. (2010). Chemistry in food. Caracas: Academy of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences