Reduced Fat Food Emulsions: Physicochemical, Sensory, and Biological Aspects

Abstract

Fat plays multiple important roles in imparting desirable sensory attributes to emulsion-based food products, such as sauces, dressings, soups, beverages, and desserts. However, there is concern that over consumption of fats leads to increased incidences of chronic diseases, such as obesity, coronary heart disease, and diabetes. Consequently, there is a need to develop reduced fat products with desirable sensory profiles that match those of their full-fat counterparts. The successful design of high quality reduced-fat products requires an understanding of the many roles that fat plays in determining the sensory attributes of food emulsions, and of appropriate strategies to replace some or all of these attributes. This paper reviews our current understanding of the influence of fat on the physicochemical and physiological attributes of food emulsions, and highlights some of the main approaches that can be used to create high quality emulsion-based food products with reduced fat contents.

Keywords:

• Fats
• textural perception
• emulsion
• instrumental analysis
• sensory evaluation
• reduced fat foods
• satiety

ACKNOWLEGMENTS

The authors thank Eric Decker, Kerstin Olson, and Ware Flora for valuable discussions on reduced fat products.

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by ConAgra Foods and the Cooperative State Research, Extension, Education Service, US Department of Agriculture, Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station, and US Department of Agriculture NRI, and AFRI programs.