Current trends in the realm of baking: When indulgent consumers demand healthy sustainable foods

Abstract

The term “baked goods” encompasses multiple food products made from flour (typically wheat flour). Among them, bread has stood as a foundation in different cultures by providing energy, mostly from its starch fraction, while being low in fats and sugars. Nevertheless, breadcrumbs are categorized as having a high amount of rapidly digestible starch that has been associated with poor health outcomes, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, as well as other metabolic-related health problems. In this regard, the enrichment of bread with resistant starch (RS) ingredients is gaining prominence and can be definitively positioned as an impactful strategy to improve human health through diet. In this Special Issue, structural factors for the resistance to digestion and hydrothermal processing of clean label RS ingredients are reviewed by Roman et al.[1], who expanded the definition of each RS subtype to account for recently reported novel and natural non-digestible structures. The term baked goods also include cakes and cookies, which are rich in fats and sugars but represent an excellent choice for indulgent consumption. While bread may be an excellent food carrier of added nutritional and extranutritional compounds, such as proteins, dietary fibers and bioactive phytochemicals, the effort to improve the nutritional properties of cakes and cookies has focused on the elimination or reduction of fats and sugars associated with poor health outcomes. As an example, milk fats have typically been used in cake-and cookie-making, and their high content in calories and saturated fatty acids has encouraged food researchers and technologists to develop fat mimetics, as discussed in this Special Issue in the review by Huang et al. [Texto extraído del artículo de Manuel Gómez Pallarés].