Cactus pear fruits and cladodes: a source of functional components for foods
2002
Saenz, C.
Dietary trends' current emphasis on safe and healthy foods extends to searches for new components with more than just nutritive value. Functional components such as dietary fiber, natural colorants, and antioxidant vitamins are some of the nutrients people want to include in their daily diet. Certain vegetables are promising sources of such components. One of them is Opuntia spp. fruits and cladodes. This review discusses some aspects of the betalains (pigments present in some cactus fruits), as well as the dietary fiber and mucilage present in the cactus cladodes. Because natural colorants, especially red, are very rare, and some of the artificial ones are known to be a risk to human health, betalains from the red beet are widely used as a natural colorant. The purple cactus pear fruit could be another source of this pigment. Dietary fiber, with its growing incidence in the prevention of certain illnesses, is gaining more importance for the human diet each day. Another source of this fiber could be the cactus cladodes. For use as thickening agents, natural additives can be obtained from vegetables such as carob seeds and tragacanth gum; cactus mucilage could be another. These various components could all be used as natural ingredients in different foods to enhance their healthy properties. These new functional components from cactus pear open new possibilities for adding value to a very ancient, but not suffiencntly known, crop of the arid and semiarid regions of the world.
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