NUTRIFISH - Nutritional Studies on Dried Functional Ingredients Containing n-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids

1998: The project objectives are to define the lowest intake of n-3 PUFA which will exert a positive nutritional effect against biomarkers of chronic diseases in humans; to design high quality bioavailable fish oil-enriched ingredients; to incorporate these novel dried ingredients in a range of consumer food products.
The tasks at FF are to provide fish oil for powder-production, to set up quality specifications for fish oil, to prepare antioxidant formulations and to test their efficiencies, and to study formation and identity of volatile oxidation products formed in spray-dried fish oil powders during storage.
Fish oil was refined and deodorized for production of microencapsulated fish oil and for a storage experiment. The fish oil was protected against oxidation by adding a antioxidant system prepared at FF.
The shelf-life of commercial powders have been compared with the shelf-life of powders produced in this project.
The dynamic headspace method develop at FF, applying analysis of the volatiles by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS),was used to evaluate sensorially significant volatiles formed by lipid oxidation. Compounds with a characteristic and easily detectable odour were selected by GC sniffing analyses. The amount of the volatiles were calculated using calibration curves, that were determined by quantitative GC-MS analysis of standards. The amounts of volatiles were found in levels of microgram volatiles / g powder (ppm).