Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

As the population of older adults has been increasing throughout the world, the demand of the elderly diets with a softened texture is on the rise and a great deal of effort has been made to develop foods for older adults. However, there are severe difficulties in applying existing methods such as U...

As the population of older adults has been increasing throughout the world, the demand of the elderly diets with a softened texture is on the rise and a great deal of effort has been made to develop foods for older adults. However, there are severe difficulties in applying existing methods such as Universal Design Food (UDF) and Korean Industrial Standard (KS) to measure the rheological properties of the elderly diets. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop an instrumental methodology that can be universally applied to a wide variety of foods.
In this study, a universal instrumental methodology had been systematically established to measure the rheological properties of the elderly foods and its applicability to commercial food products was confirmed. Out of four different rheological methods based on human mastication, the puncture test which showed a high correlation (R2 = 0.9885) with the UDF method, was chosen as a universal rheological measurement method. The operation conditions of the puncture test were established as follows – rod probe (5 mm diameter), crosshead speed (100 mm/min), sample geometry (width > 20 mm, height < 20 mm), and plate orifice (10 mm). When both of the puncture and UDF tests with 60 food samples were carried out, a highly linear correlation (y=0.9957x, "R" ^2=0.9306) was observed between the two methods. Furthermore, the reproducibility of the developed puncture test was evaluated by an inter-laboratory analysis, giving the RSD values of 2.21-8.77%. Finally, the puncture test was applied to monitor the rheological values of the 28 commercial food samples which cannot be measured by the UDF method, and successfully used to determine whether they can satisfy the current rheological criteria (500,000 N/m2) of the elderly foods. Therefore, this study is expected to provide objective rheological guidelines for the food industry to develop the elderly foods.

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