Mushroom compost adds fibre to snacks
By Food in Canada staff
Business OperationsA study out of the U.K. has found benefits to adding mushroom waste to extruded snacks: more fibre and lower glycaemic response
Manchester, U.K. – Researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University have found a novel way to add fibre to extruded snacks.
The researchers found that spent mushroom compost can boost nutrition in snacks and help to regulate the glycaemic response of snacks.
The mushroom waste, reports BakeryandSnacks.com, were harvested an refined as a freeze-dried powder called mushroom co-product material (MCM).
MCM was added at five per cent, 10 per cent and 15 per cent of wheat flour in extruded cereal snack products and compared to a sample without MCM.
What the researchers found was that MCM increased the amount of total dietary fibre considerably.
Clear benefit
They concluded that MCM has a clear benefit in terms of improving the nutritional quality of snack products.
MCM also offers significant reduction in glucose release during its in vitro digestion compared to the control products.
The study also looked at MCM’s impact on product characteristics.
Snack products with MCM showed a much greater expansion ratio than the control sample and were denser at both five per cent and 10 per cent levels, reports BakeryandSnacks.com.
Water absorption and water solubility were found to be lower than the control sample.
The researchers say that further research is needed to assess how consumers would accept snacks with MCM.
The researchers published their study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
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