Microencapsulation of Vitamins

Functional foods are beginning to play a major role in what consumers buy and eat. The International Life Science Institute has defined a functional food as ‘a food which has a beneficial effect on one or more target functions of the body, above and beyond the usual effects of food, such as improving the state of health and well-being or reducing the risk of disease. Examples of these types of food include folate addition to breakfast cereals to reduce the risk of neural tube defects in the developing fetus, milk fortification with calcium to combat osteoporosis and addition of omega 3 to breads to aid in reducing heart disease. Currently, health claims are illegal on food packaging in Australia (except for claims relating to folate). Food Standards Australia and New Zealand are reviewing this legislation to allow general health claims by mid 2006 (Herald Sun, 27/05/05). Some nutrients do not remain in the food for a significant amount of time or may react with the other food components causing undesirable effects. Microencapsulation is a technology that can improve the retention time of the nutrient in the food and allow controlled release at specific times, during food consumption or in the intestinal gut. It is not a new technology and was first commercially applied in 1954 for carbonless copy paper (Dziezak, 1988). Microencapsulation technique has been utilised in the pharmaceutical industry for the past 30 years to offer controlled release of drugs to the body (Rosinski et al., 2002). It is relatively new to the food industry and is finding use in maximising the retention of the bioactivity of the components during the processing and storage of the formulated product and delivering the desired bioactive components to the target site of the body (Korhonen, 2002). Microencapsulation has been used to encapsulate fish oil to increase n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid intake (Higgins et al., 1999), to encapsulate probiotic bacteria in frozen dairy foods (Shah and Ravula, 2000) and among other things, to encapsulate 2acetyl-1-pyrroline (ACPY; a major flavour component of aromatic rice) to retain this flavour component upon storage (Apintanapong and Noomhorn, 2003).