Centre for Formulation Engineering, School of Chemical Engineering, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Food Funct. 2013 Jun;4(6):880-8. doi: 10.1039/c3fo30106k. Epub 2013 May 2.
Eating is a complex process with a range of phenomena occurring simultaneously, including fracture, temperature changes, mixing with saliva, flavour and aroma release. Sensory perception as experienced in the oral cavity has a strong effect on the overall acceptability of the food. Thus in an engineering sense one would want to be able to understand and predict phenomena for different food matrices in order to design more palatable foods through understanding food oral processing without the health concerns of adding salt, fat and sugar. In this work we seek to obtain such an understanding for salt release from food matrices and perception viewing the oral processing as a physical/chemical reactor. A set of equations was developed to account for mass balance and transfer. Data required for the model such as effective diffusivity and mixing times were obtained from the chemical engineering literature. The model predictions compared favourably with published TI data, managing to capture key phenomena including response to pulsed salt release. The model was used to predict response to a range of food matrices and indicated that for solids and thickened liquid food products there is the potential to modulate consumer response by pulsing the release of sodium.
进食是一个复杂的过程，同时发生着一系列现象，包括食物破碎、温度变化、与唾液混合、味道和香气释放。口腔中的感官感知对食物的整体可接受性有很强的影响。因此，从工程角度来看，人们希望能够理解和预测不同食品基质的现象，以便通过了解食品口腔加工来设计出更可口的食品，而无需担心添加盐、脂肪和糖所带来的健康问题。在这项工作中，我们试图通过将口腔加工视为物理/化学反应器来获得对食品基质中盐释放和感知的这种理解。我们开发了一组方程来解释质量平衡和转移。模型所需的数据，如有效扩散系数和混合时间，是从化学工程文献中获得的。模型预测与已发表的 TI 数据进行了比较，成功地捕捉到了包括对脉冲盐释放的响应在内的关键现象。该模型用于预测一系列食品基质的响应情况，并表明对于固体和增稠液体食品产品，通过脉冲释放钠，有可能调节消费者的响应。
