Nutritional and Functional Characteristics of Protein-Fortified Pasta from Sweet Potato

Gourikutty Padmaja,Renjusha Menon,Jyothi Gopalakrishnan,Subramoney Narayana Moorthy,Moothandassery Sankarankutty Sajeev

doi:10.4236/fns.2011.29129

Abstract

Despite being a healthy low glycaemic index food, the production and consumption of sweet potatoes are decreasing globally. The global production trends indicated a decline from 130.47 million tonnes (MT) in 2004 to 107.64 MT in 2009, while the production in China, having the largest share towards world production of sweet potatoes, witnessed a decrease from 105.84 MT in 2004 to 81.21 MT in 2009. There is an interest in increasing consumption of healthy low glycaeimic index foods, especially in the context of a projected alarming rise in the diabetic population in the developing world by 2025. The objective of this study was to enhance the utilization of sweet potato as a low glycaemic food, mainly through its use in the development of high protein pasta. Among three protein sources, whey protein concentrate (WPC), defatted soy flour (DSF), and fish powder (FP), WPC gave high quality pasta with strong starch-protein network formation, as evidenced from scanning electron microscopic studies and low in vitro starch digestibility. Protein nutritional quality was also high for WPC-fortified sweet potato pasta, with very high scores for lysine and leucine as well as high essential amino acid index and calculated protein efficiency ratio. Fractionation of starch showed that the WPC-fortified sweet potato pasta had the lowest rapidly digested starch (RDS) and the highest resistant starch (RS) content, indicating its potential as a low glycaemic food.

Highlights

Sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas (L) Lam.] has assumed great significance in recent years as a health food due to the various bioactive principles in the roots
Since sweet potato lacks gluten type proteins, incorporation of appropriate protein additives was necessary to maintain the quality of sweet potato pasta which helped in augmenting the protein nutritional quality of pasta
With a view to enhancing the utilization of sweet potato, an easy to cook nutritionally fortified, low glycaemic pasta was developed from sweet potato flour using protein sources like whey protein concentrate (WPC), defatted soy flour (DSF) and fish powder (FP) and the nutritional, cooking as well as digestibility characteristics were studied

Summary

Introduction

Sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas (L) Lam.] has assumed great significance in recent years as a health food due to the various bioactive principles in the roots. China, which contributes the major share of world sweet potato production, indicates a decline from 105.84 MT in 2004 to 81.21 MT in 2009 [1]. The total production of sweet potato roots in India decreased from 1.18 MT to 1.12 MT during 2004-2007, indicating that its importance as a food item is decreasing. Despite being a carbohydrate rich food, sweet potato is reported to have low glycaemic index (

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Conclusion