Food Oral Processing and Tribology: Instrumental Approaches and Emerging Applications

Abstract

ABSTRACT Food is very intricate in terms of its composition, structure, and function. Apart from nutritional and functional benefits, sensory attributes directly link to consumer acceptance. Among sensory attributes, texture plays a vital role and is predominantly perceived during oral food processing. Oral processing of food is a dynamic multistage process consisting of complex stages of biting, chewing, saliva incorporation, bolus formation, swallowing, and mouth coating. There are numerous techniques to evaluate food texture, but all of them focus on understanding the rheological and mechanical behaviour of foods. Till date, there is no ideal technique to decode the entire multifaceted process of texture perception during oral processing. Tribology is an emerging field which takes into consideration the effect of lubrication by saliva, surface properties, and frictional forces between food and oral parts such as the tongue and hard palate. Several researchers are exploring the scope of using tribology in understanding complex mouthfeel characteristics such as astringency, smoothness, fat-perception, slipperiness, creaminess, roughness, and mouth-coating characteristics, by establishing a correlation with frictional behaviour. A range of tribometers have been designed and/or conventional texture measurement devices are being modified with accessories to measure the tribological behaviour to comprehend texture using novel approaches. This work presents an up-to-date information on the key aspects of the science of food tribology.