OXIDATION STABILITY AND THE EFFECTS OF NATURAL ANTIOXIDANT ADDITIVES IN MEAT

Meat is the main proteic food product consumed in the human diet.

There is a high risk of quality loss for meat due to lipid oxidation, which leads to rancid taste and off-flavor development. Furthermore, the easy attack from bacteria makes its shelf-life quite limited. 

The addition of food additives, such as antioxidants and preservatives, which are mainly synthetic compounds and whose consumption is correlated with various health risk factors, is necessary to increase storage stability, sensory quality, and nutritional value.

But presently consumers are constantly demanding more natural foods, asking the industry to use natural antioxidants. In this context, the extraction of active compounds from agro-industrial byproducts is gaining growing interest for their high content of phenolic and antioxidant active molecules.

The use of natural additives to preserve meat stability is strongly encouraged, and in prior years has been proposed as a substitute for common synthetic preservatives.

The OXITEST method is an internationally recognized analytical technique for the determination of the oxidation stability of food, fats, and oils.

The oxidation stability tests performed with the OXITEST reactor accelerate the oxidation process that normally can last weeks or months and provide fast, accurate, and reliable results.

The OXITEST speeds up the oxidation process because of two accelerating factors, temperature, and oxygen pressure, without the need for preliminary fat separation.

The instrument measures the absolute pressure change inside the two chambers. It monitors the oxygen uptake by reactive components in the sample and automatically generates an IP value, which is the time required to reach the starting point of oxidation. The longer the Induction Period, the higher the stability against oxidation over time.

During this comparative analysis, two samples of sausage, with and without basil as an antioxidant, were analyzed in duplicate.

The OXISoft^TM software option "Formula Comparison" was used to make a comparison of the different samples tested under the same condition, and identify the most stable one.

The results obtained clearly discriminate the sausage as is and the sausage with basil aroma resistance to oxidation. 

Aromatic plants such as basil, rosemary, and oregano, rich in compounds, show strong antioxidant properties.

The OXITEST can be proposed as an easy method to assess the effect of natural extracts addition to meat products, to test how they increase food products' shelf-life, in particular thanks to their activity against fat oxidation.

 

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