Victoria Jideani

By V. A. Jideani

Part of the book: Soybean

By Victoria Adaora Jideani and Claudine Florett Diedericks

Part of the book: Antioxidant-Antidiabetic Agents and Human Health

By Yvonne Maphosa and Victoria A. Jideani

There has been an increase in consumer demand for healthy food products made from natural ingredients. This demand has been partly addressed by the substitution of natural alternatives to synthetic ingredients. One such example in this endeavour, is the study of the application of natural biopolymers as food emulsion stabilisers. When biopolymers such as proteins and polysaccharides or their complexes are applied as emulsion stabilisers, they exhibit different modes of action. These include acting as emulsifiers (polypeptides), increasing the viscosity of the medium (polysaccharides), reducing coalescence by coating individual droplets as well as acting as weighting agents (polysaccharides and polypeptides). Biopolymers can be covalently complexed using chemical, enzymatic or thermal treatments. These treatments generally increase the robustness and solubility of the final complexes. Biopolymer complexes have been reported to show higher stability to varying temperatures, pH and ionic strength. When two incompatible biopolymers are mixed, either associative or segregative phase separation occurs. The former involves separation of oppositely charged polymers due to electrostatic repulsion and the latter involves separation of similarly charged or neutral biopolymers. In this chapter, the stabilising effect, complexation, mode of action, phase behaviour and future application of biopolymers in emulsions are discussed.

Part of the book: Science and Technology Behind Nanoemulsions

By Victoria Jideani

Published articles (28) from PubMed database on banana sensory characteristics were from 2002 to 2018. They were mined to detect the topic of discussion using the KNIME software. The texts were tagged with the Open Source Chemistry Analysis Routines (OSCAR) chemical named entity and preprocessed by filtering and stemming, thereafter the topic of discussion detected with the Latent Dirichlet Allocation and term co-occurrence was determined using KNIME data mining software. The co-occurrence terms were converted to node adjacency matrix and imported into Gephi Graph Visualisation and Manipulation software version 0.02. Network statistics such as modularity class, degree centrality, betweenness and closeness centrality were estimated. Majority of the OSCAR tagged words (50.8%) were chemical compounds and 47.3% ontology terms. The directed network consisted of 53 nodes and 904 edges. There were four modularity classes. The terms with high betweenness centrality (>45) were, accept, fruit, analysis, coat, food, composite and banana. Three topics were detected from the documents, namely (1) quality of banana fruit and peel; (2) use of banana fruit in food and wine and (3) sensory acceptability of banana peel and flour in food products. This chapter provides details each topic.

Part of the book: Banana Nutrition