Going Healthy, Going Grape

The addition of a grape seed extract (GSE) to bread may not only increase the antioxidant content of the baked product, it may also also inhibit formation of a potential toxin, say food chemistry scientists from the University of Hong Kong.

The report is called ‘The Effects of Grape Seed Extract Fortification on the Antioxidant Activity and Quality Attributes of Bread’ and was led by Xiaofang Peng from the University of Hong Kong in Food Chemistry.
The Hong Kong-based researchers explain that N15-(carboxymethyl) lysine (CML) is an undesirable byproduct of glycation (simple sugar molecules combining with proteins or fats), and is widely found in bread, particularly in the crust, writes Stephen Daniells.
“Currently it is viewed as a potential toxicant in food,” the researchers stated. “Moreover it has become a biomarker associated with oxidative stress, atherosclerosis and diabetes in humans.”
Addition of an extract from grape seed was found to not only boost the antioxidant activity of the bread, thereby offering the promise of a functional food, but also reduced CML levels, thereby lowering the potential health risks associated with this compound, wrote the report’s author.
According to the report’s new findings, addition of the grape seed extract or GSE reduced the levels of CML in a dose-dependent manner, meaning the more GSE used, the less CML was formed.
“Addition of GSE dose-dependently reduced CML content in bread crust relative to the control. In particular, adding 600 and 1000 mg of GSE to bread (500 g) led to over 30 and 50 per cent reduction in bread crust CML content, respectively,” they added.
An improvement in the antioxidant activity was also recorded in the bread samples prepared with the extract, but compared to free GSE, thermal processing reduced the antioxidant activity by about 30 to 40 per cent.