Self-Assembly in Food – A New Way to Make Nutritious Products - Food Colloids: Self-Assembly and Material Science - page 19

Chapter 2
Self-Assembly in Food - A New Way to
Make Nutritious Products
Martin Michel, Heribert J. Watzke, Laurent Sagalowicz, Eric
Kolodziejczyk and Martin E. Leser
NESTLE ´ RESEARCH CENTER, VERS-CHEZ-LES-BLANC, CH-1000
LAUSANNE 26, SWITZERLAND
2.1 Introduction
For many years food manufacturers have been trying to meet the rising
expectations of consumers for nutritionally balanced and healthy foods. The
current way to address this challenge is to 'enhance' nutritional functionality
within a product by adding to a common food base various bioactives such as
probiotics, sterols, flavones, carotenoids and polyphenols. 1 Such enrichments
are often linked to a health claim, supported by a clinical study, and with the
stated aim of preventing a potential health problem. 2 Recent examples of added
bioactives are plant sterols to prevent cardiovascular diseases, 3-5 isoflavones for
improving bone health 6 and lycopene for cancer prevention. 7-9
The next major step in value addition to food will be to deliver food products
adapted to the nutritional and health needs of an individual, because different
people respond differently to similar diets and life styles. 10,11 This step requires
new strategies to elucidate the causes of these differences and to establish how to
address them via nutritional means. The current focus lies on nutrigenomics, 12,13
i.e., the study of how genetics and metabolic processes relate to nutrition. This
approach will help to identify more effectively those people who are statistically
more likely to develop a particular disease and would benefit from a personal-
ized diet. A major challenge will be the translation of the resulting data into
adequate nutrition solutions.
The study and understanding of how the digestive system functions will play
another important role in food personalization. After all, making an 'individ-
ual' means keeping apart what is 'in' from what is 'out'. 14 Humans (and most
animals) digest their food extra-cellularly, i.e., outside of the cells. The digestive
space is delimited by the gastrointestinal tract, an approximately 10-m long
tube from mouth to anus. The digestive system is strictly speaking 'outside the
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