New development for pasta products: immature wheat and functional component

The development of foods that can provide benefits beyond their nutritional values has focused attention on public and industrial researchers.In recent years the ability of functional food to influence metabolic parameters and some chronic disease is being explored. Novel uses of cereals have shown that cereal grains harvested at milky stage produce raw material with usefull nutritional and chemical characteristics; so immature cereal grains appear to be an interesting raw material for functional foods as they contain fructooligasaccharides (FOS) in quantities significantly higher than mature grains. FOS are low molecular weight polymers of fructose and are classified as "prebiotic"; i fact are non-digestible compounds that beneficially affect the host by selectively stimulating the growth and/or the activity of one or a limited number of colon bacteria (e.g.Bifidobacteria). The addition of wholemeal from immature wheat grain to semolina was used for pasta production. The innovative pasta product have shown more interesting nutritional characteristics than those exhibited by whole meal spaghetti; the product is also characterised by reduced starch availability to digestive enzimes. The influence of immature wheat grain integration on glycemic index of pasta, together with the actual prebiotic effects of FOS have to be confirmed by in vivo studies.