Jornal de Distúrbios Alimentares e Nutricionais

Omega 3 fatty acid fortification: a novel approach by chia seeds in manufacturing of healthy products supporting the current trend of clean label

Muhammad Abdullah Bin Masood

The current of developing food products with natural ingredients and avoiding synthetic ones, have led the commercial food processer to reformulate their products without adding synthetic substances to meet the specification of clean label. However, these natural substances in addition to their likely acceptance by consumer and healthy outcomes, have limited applicability because of their poor technological quality as compared to synthetic one which are normally available at least cost. Chia seeds an ancient plant of Mexico have been blessed with wide variety of technological quality as compared to other plants. The straightforwardness of its nature has allowed its successful incorporation in broad range of food products related to oil, baking, dairy, packaging, meat, extrusion and nutrition sector. The 35-41% of oil present in its seed is 69% ALA and 21% LA thus making it to be the riches source of PUFAs (90%). The oil can be successfully incorporated in food products and has significantly increased their content of PUFAs. Studies have found that increasing the concentration of chia seeds increases the ALA but such increase has detrimental effect on the technological quality of the products. However, 2.5% incorporation of intact chia seeds have shown balanced results regarding nutrition and technological quality.