Exploiting grain bioactivity for improved nutrition and health

Foods should be made available to deliver more grain fibre and outer layers of the grains, while also addressing the consumer expectations of palatability and convenience. This demands for new ingredients high in grain phytochemicals and with good technological properties. The natural diversity in grains offers a good basis for tailored fractionation and bioprocessing. The grain chain from plant breeding and crop selection should take into account the nutritional quality criteria set by the end-use. This was the approach in the EU integrated project HEALTHGRAIN running in 2005-2010 (www.healthgrain.org), which addressed the whole grain chain to provide consumers with healthy grain-based foods and ingredients (Poutanen et al 2008). It included studies of consumer expectations, development of a biotechnology toolbox for plant breeding, development of wet and dry milling and novel bioprocessing technologies for grain processing, studies of mechanisms behind the metabolic merits of foods in a series of in vitro, animal and human studies, and identification of health-relevant cereal food criteria.