Advances in Cereal and Pseudocereal Researches for Functional Foods

Wheat and related grasses such as barley, rye, amaranth and quinoa have always been important for foods in Europe, the Levant and the western part of Asia. The food products of these cereals and pseudo-cereals have been mostly produced from white flours, which are milled from whole grains using the conventional milling method. Although the texture and sensory qualities of the products made from the white flours have been improved, the nutritive values of these products have become lower because most of the nutritional compounds such as dietary fibre, resistant starch, vitamins, minerals and microconstituents in the bran and germ have been removed from the white flours. Therefore, the consumption of whole grains has been considered to have many physiological benefits related to "western diseases" such as coronary heart disease, colon cancer and diabetes. Recently, researchers tried to find a good method to prepare foodstuffs containing sufficient amounts of nutritional compounds, especially dietary fibre and minerals. In this book, recent advances in cereal and pseudo-cereal based food researches have been reviewed. New milling techniques have been applied to produce graded flours which contain large amounts of dietary fibre, vitamins and minerals and could be applied for substitution with the conventionally milled flour in bread-making to produce functional food products with high safety, palatability and nutrition. In addition, germination of cereal and pseudo-cereal grains helps to improve the chemical compositions, nutritive values and acceptability characteristics of functional food products. All of this useful information can be seen in this book.