Baking&Snack - October 2013 - 48

SATIETY FACTORS

High-potency sweeteners can
help adjust calorie count without
affecting indulgent appeal.

When dieters are asked what food components they
would like to limit in order to lose weight, sugar and
fat are top of mind, according to Ms. Brons. As a result,
sugar substitutes have become increasingly popular and
so has the reduction of fat.
“On the positive nutrition side, dieters indicate that fiber and whole grains, along with proteins, vitamins and
minerals, are considered important to consume in sufficient quantities to lose weight,” Ms. Brons said. “Baked
goods and snacks lend themselves perfectly to the ‘taking out the negatives and adding the positives’ trend.”
According to Mr. O’Brien, the challenge with replacing ingredients such as fat and sugar is the overall impact on taste, texture, sweetness and product quality.
“Consumers are looking for better-for-you products but
want the taste, texture and product quality equivalent to
their full-fat, full-sugar counterparts,” he said.

Ingredion

Most of us: not-so-healthy eaters
There’s a big difference between what we say about our health and what our
eating habits actually reveal. The NPD Group verified this dichotomy once again
in its report, “The Market for Functional Foods, released in September 2012.
”
Consistently, eight out of 10 US adults describe themselves as “extremely
healthy” or “very healthy, but only one in five follows what is considered to
”
be a “most healthy” diet, and 65% of adults have a body mass index (BMI)
that characterizes them as overweight or obese, according to the market
research company based at Rosemont, IL.
Yet there’s hope. In spite of their overly positive assessment of their own
health, almost half of adult Americans in the NPD survey recognized the need
to change their diet in order to improve the overall healthfulness of their lives.
These adults defined healthy eating in terms of adding to or taking something out of their diets. Well over half, 55%, of the 1,921 adults surveyed said
that eating healthy is equally adding to and taking out of their diet. Among
the others, 26% said that “adding something to the diet” is healthy eating,
and 19% said that “taking something out” of the diet is.
NPD observed that dieting, which is traditionally more about taking
something out of the diet, is not the health or weight management solution
it once was for American adults. The percentage of adults claiming to be on
a diet is down from earlier years. What are people doing instead? They are
taking vitamins and eating functional foods and beverages — those fortified
with whole grains or probiotics.
“A huge opportunity exists to increase functional product usage among
adults and teens who have already tried functional products at some point
but are not using them on a daily basis, said Darren Seifer, NPD food and
”
beverage industry analyst. “If the 118 million less-frequent adult users could
be encouraged to include just one more functional food or beverage in their
diet each week, this would result in an increase of more than 6 billion eatings each year.
”

/ Baking & Snack / October 2013

Better-for-you carbs
Simple sugars, which are calorically dense and nutrient-void
carbohydrates, seem to be what
most consumers are aggressively
trying to reduce in their diet. With
baked goods, which by design are
carbohydrate laden, bakers are
learning how to formulate with
better-for-you carbs.
“Considering the frightening
increase of obesity and diabetes
prevalent in the US, it is time the
food industry adapts new formulation approaches and makes
smart carbohydrate ingredient
choices to produce foods that
address these epidemics,” said
Joseph O’Neill, president and general manager, Beneo Inc., Morris
Plains, NJ. “The key to a sustainable and healthy weight is to keep
the balance between calorie intake
and energy output. Smart carbohydrate ingredients can assist.”
Specialty carbohydrates and
prebiotic fibers can help bakers
address weight management from
a smart energy management perspective. Beneo’s prebiotic fibers
— inulin and oligofructose, both
derived from chicory root — as
well as its isomalt, which is a
polyol derived from sugar beets,
are technical solutions for fiber-

Baking&Snack - October 2013

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