Molar mass effect in food and health

Nishinari, Katsuyoshi; Fang, Yapeng

It is demanded to supply foods with good quality for all the humans. With the advent of aging society, palatable and healthy foods are required to improve the quality of life and reduce the burden of finance for medical expenditure. Food hydrocolloids can contribute to this demand by versatile functions such as thickening, gelling, stabilising, and emulsifying, controlling texture and flavour release in food processing. Molar mass effects on viscosity and diffusion in liquid foods, and on mechanical and other physical properties of solid and semi-solid foods and films are overviewed. In these functions, the molar mass is one of the key factors, and therefore, the effects of molar mass on various health problems related to noncommunicable diseases or symptoms such as cancer, hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia, constipation, high blood pressure, knee pain, osteoporosis, cystic fibrosis and dysphagia are described. Understanding these problems only from the viewpoint of molar mass is limited since other structural characteristics, conformation, branching, blockiness in copolymers such as pectin and alginate, degree of substitution as well as the position of the substituents are sometimes the determining factor rather than the molar mass. Nevertheless, comparison of different behaviours and functions in different polymers from the viewpoint of molar mass is expected to be useful to find a common characteristics, which may be helpful to understand the mechanism in other problems.