Abstract
In well-developed countries, people have started to pay additional attention to preserving healthy dietary habits, as it has become common knowledge that neglecting them may easily lead to severe health impairments, namely obesity, malnutrition, several cardiovascular diseases, type-2 diabetes, cancers, hypertensions, and inflammations. Various types of functional foods were developed that are enriched with vitamins, probiotics, prebiotics, and dietary fibers in order to develop a healthy balanced diet and to improve the general health of consumers. Numerous kinds of fiber are easily found in nature, but they often have a noticeable undesired impact on the sensory features of foods or on the digestive system. This led to development of modified dietary fibers, which have little to no impact on taste of foods they are added to. At the same time, they possess all the benefits similar to those of prebiotics, such as regulating gastrointestinal microbiota composition, increasing satiety, and improving the metabolic parameters of a human. In the following review, the evidence supporting prebiotic properties of modified starches, particularly resistant starches and their derivatives, resistant dextrins, was assessed and deliberated, which allowed drawing an interesting conclusion on the subject.
Highlights
One of the first definitions of prebiotics stems from the mid-1990s, when they were described as “the non-digestible components of the food that facilitate growth and/or activity of a beneficial microorganisms inhabiting the gastrointestinal tract of a host”
‘associated substances’ that are not carbohydrates, e.g., lignin [30]. These views are evident in the worldwide dietary recommendations, which strongly emphasize the consumption of dietary fiber (DF) naturally occurring in food, whereas added and nondigested carbohydrate polymers are much less recommended, due to the limited evidence of health benefits of these specific types of fiber
Β-glucans and pectins are fibers that are fermentable by gut microbiota while possessing high solubility and viscosity, to psyllium [50]. These fibers occur naturally in whole grains and fruits: β-glucan occurs mainly in barley and oats, whereas pectin occurs in lemons and apples [43]. Fibers with properties such as low viscosity and high solubility can be rapidly used by the gut microbiota for fermentation purposes: this includes resistant starch and dextrins, inulin, polydextrose, and absoluble type of corn fiber [54]
Summary
Various types of functional foods were developed that are enriched with vitamins, probiotics, prebiotics, and dietary fibers in order to develop a healthy balanced diet and to improve the general health of consumers. Numerous kinds of fiber are found in nature, but they often have a noticeable undesired impact on the sensory features of foods or on the digestive system. This led to development of modified dietary fibers, which have little to no impact on taste of foods they are added to. K. Efficiency of Resistant Starch and Dextrins as Prebiotics: A Review of Keywords: resistant dextrin; resistant starch; prebiotic; human health; gut microbiota; dietary fiber the Existing Evidence and Clinical.
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