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Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to week 2. I hope you have gone through the contents of 1st week, and you have find something important in that content regarding the basic concepts, health benefits and other contents. So let us start with the 2nd week content. And 2nd week contents have lots of interesting topics. And the topics we will cover in 2nd week are,

• Plants and Animal Based Source Functional Foods
• Benefits of Functional Components
• Bio-active Compounds and their Role in Health Promotion
• Cereals and Vegetables as Functional Foods, and
• The Status of the Functional Foods and Availability in the market

When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use. When diet is right, medicine is of no need. This is very rightly said. By changing our eating habits, and by knowing the beneficial aspects of this bio-active compounds, we can change our lifestyle, we can enhance our health and can prevent many serious diseases. Like in every time we are talking about the functional compounds; the functional compounds. What the functional compounds are? How we will define that? Functional compounds are the biologically active compounds that are found in food, and they have the capability to alter or to change the different processes, the metabolic pathways in the body. And that’s why they are responsible for the alteration or for the prevention of the diseases and promote our health.

Now let’s start with our first lecture that is ‘Plants and Animal source Based Function Foods’. Now the functional foods that we derive from the plant sources are

Primary metabolites, that includes the

• plant proteins
• beta-glucans, and
• omega-3 fatty acids.

Secondary metabolites, these include the

• phytoestrogens
• antioxidants
• tocopherols
• steroids, and
• gamma-linolenic acid that is GLA and
• phase 2 enzyme inducers, and
• brassica vegetables that include cabbage, cauliflower.

They act as a functional foods. And their mechanism of action is like, they are able to glycosylating the insoluble toxins to produce soluble compounds that are excreted. Now animal derived functional foods. We call the animal derived functional foods as zoo chemicals. And the functional compounds that we derive from the plant sources, that we call the phytochemicals. So the zoo chemicals they include the

• omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids,
• GLA that is conjugated linolenic acid,
• small peptides,
• whey and casein, and
• glucosamine.

Whey and casein are the milk proteins. Omega 3 fatty acids include alpha-linolenic, DHA, EPA fatty acids and others. Now microbial sources are also important to mention here as the source of the bioactive compounds or function compounds. There are three sources of these function compounds. First the probiotics, and probiotics are the live micro-organisms, when administered they confer the health benefits. And two species are very important to mention here; that are generally regarded as safe, as a grass. That is lacto-bacillus and bifida bacteria species.

Secondly the prebiotics. Prebiotics are the known digestive substances, that enhance or that stimulate the growth of the probiotics. Means if we add some prebiotic substance to the probiotics, they will stimulate the growth, they will enhance the growth. And third aspect is synbiotics. Synbiotics means combo of probiotics and prebiotics. And the word synbiotic is, I will lots of meaning here. Like the relationship should be synergistic type, means mutual understanding should be there, means one will enhance the growth of the other. Some other kind of functional food sources are also there. Algae, it will provide the omega 3 fatty acids; which enhance the immunity, also modulate the inflammation. And protect the neuro-degenerative diseases. Mushrooms are also good source of functional compounds. And they are, by providing the beneficial effect like anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory properties.

Now genetic engineering and function foods. Have you heard, I think about the genetic engineering concept also. And what is the importance of genetic engineering in functional foods. Genetic engineering, we go through the cross production, means the desirable gene. We take a desirable gene, that we want for a particular benefit. And we take that gene and insert in that particular plant for the beneficial effect. But there are some resistance regarding the acceptance of the genetically or GM foods or GM crops. A few example in case of functional foods are like. We can enhance the components by improving the fatty acid profiles in oilseed crop, and we can also modify the protein quality of the potatoes, and anti-oxidant content in different crops by adopting the genetic engineering.

There are few examples to make you clear about the genetic engineering aspect. Like rice. Rice did not have the pro-vitamin A; that is very good for the healthy vision. What we have done during genetic engineering, like we use the transgene, that is phytoene synthase, from the Daffodil. And phytoene desaturase from the Erwinia. We take the particular trans-gene and we use this gene in the rice crop to enhance this particular substance, pro-vitamin A. That is very beneficial, I have told you in the healthy vision. Similarly we will talk about tomato. In case of tomato, we have a trans-gene; we take the transgene, that is chalchone isomerase from petunia; and we insert this gene for the flavonoid contents. And flavonoids are you know that, are the potent anti-oxidants. And the third example is rice. In rice if we want to enhance iron content, then ferretin that is derived from phaseolus; that is a trans-gene, act as a transgene. We will insert this trans-gene in the crop production, during rice production. And it will enhance the iron content and use it as a iron supplement also.

So this is all about this lecture. Like the different aspects, the different sources. Plant based sources, animal based sources. Even the microbes, they are also important as a bio-active compounds. And the genetic engineering and it’s role in the functional foods. This is all about this lecture.

Thank You.