Determination of total dietary fiber of intact cereal food products by near-infrared reflectance.

Near-infrared reflectance spectra of cereal food products were acquired with a commercial dual-diode-array (Si, InGaAs) spectrometer customized to allow rapid acquisition of scans of intact breakfast cereals, snack foods, whole grains, and milled products. Substantial gains in the performance of multivariate calibration models generated from these data were obtained by a computational strategy that systematically analyzed the performance of various spectral windows. The calibration model based on 137 cereal food products determined the total dietary fiber (TDF) content of a test set of 45 intact diverse cereal food products with root-mean-squared error of cross-validation of between 1.8 and 2.0% TDF, relative to the laborious enzymatic-gravimetric reference method. The calibration performance is adequate to estimate TDF over the range of values found in diverse types of cereal food products (0.7-50.1%). The method requires no sample preparation and is relatively unaffected by specimen moisture content.