Health Benefits of Anthocyanins and Their Encapsulation for Potential Use in Food Systems: A Review

Abstract

Anthocyanins are one of the six subgroups of large and widespread group of plant constituents known as flavonoids. These are responsible for the bright and attractive orange, red, purple, and blue colors of most fruits, vegetables, flowers and some cereal grains. More than 600 structurally distinct anthocyanins have been identified in nature. Earlier, anthocyanins were only known for their coloring properties but now interest in anthocyanin pigments has intensified because of their possible health benefits as dietary antioxidants, which help to prevent neuronal diseases, cardiovascular illnesses, cancer, diabetes, inflammation, and many such others diseases. Ability of anthocyanins to counter oxidants makes them atherosclerosis fighters. Therefore, anthocyanin-rich foods may help to boost overall health by offering an array of nutrients. However, the incorporation of anthocyanins into food and medical products is a challenging task due to their low stability toward environmental conditions during processing and storage. Encapsulation seems to be an efficient way to introduce such compounds into these products. Encapsulating agents act as a protector coat against ambient adverse conditions such as light, humidity, and oxygen. Encapsulated bioactive compounds are easier to handle and offer improved stability. The main objective of this review is to explore health benefits of anthocyanins and their extraction, characterization, encapsulation, and delivery.

Antioxidant Capacity of Anthocyanin Pigments

“…Nevertheless, the incorporation of anthocyanins into food and medical products is a challenging task due to their low stability and susceptibility to degradation [292] towards environmental conditions during processing and storage. In order to prevent these limitations, delivery systems have been developed, and among them, encapsulation [328][329][330][331][332][333][334] would appear to be an interesting option.…”

“…Encapsulation, developed approximately 60 years ago [335], is a rapidly expanding technology to entrap one substance (active agent, solid, liquid or gas) within another substance (a matrix or a polymeric wall) in the form of micro-and nanoparticles to protect the 'actives' from environmental conditions and their interactions with other components or to control their release [331,332]. In addition, once encapsulated bioactive compounds are easier to transportation and handling, masking of undesirable flavour and compartmentalization of two or more reactive species [328,335].…”

“…According to the literature, encapsulation by spray-drying is the most economical, simplest and the most applied method (80-90% of encapsulates are spray-dried) for preservation of anthocyanin pigments [332], being maltodextrins as the most used coating material. The use of other techniques than spray-drying [331] still remains an unexplored area. This fact could be explained by the hydrophilic nature of anthocyanins [332,336], so it is, therefore, a promising area of research.…”

“…Some authors [330,332] have revealed that a combination of other wall materials and other modifiers (as oxygen scavengers, antioxidants, chelating agents, and surfactants) increases the encapsulation efficiencies. [131,[328][329][330][331][332][333][334][335][336][337][338][339][340][341][342] summarizes some selected reviews on anthocyanin, polyphenol and bioactive compounds encapsulation. In last years, the use of biodegradable polymeric nanoparticles has attracted the interest of researches [337] due to their good biocompatibility, easy design and preparation, structure variations and interesting biomimetic characters.…”

Desenvolvimento e avaliação de sorbets probióticos e simbióticos elaborados com polpa de Juçara (<i>Euterpe edulis</i>)

“…Dessa forma, os compostos fenólicos são capazes de exercer diversas funções benéficas à saúde, atuando na prevenção de doenças neuronais, cardiovasculares, diabetes, inflamações e diversas outras enfermidades (YOUSUF et al, 2015).…”