Manufacturers are keen to push more nutrients into processed foods, and nutraceuticals promise forgiveness for the sins of a bad diet – with iron and calcium in breakfast cereal, plant sterols in cookies, and vitamins in soda. That promise is predicted to drive a global market of nearly $263 billion by 2020, but a letter to Nature published earlier this year implicated some of the most widely used surfactant-based emulsifiers and encapsulation agents in promoting colitis and metabolic syndrome in mice… “There is concern that these materials, specifically carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate-80, could be hazardous with long-term consumption,” says Qingrong Huang, a professor of food science at Rutgers University, New Jersey, US… Speaking on 18 August at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) national meeting in Boston, US, Huang proposed an alternative approach for encapsulating and delivering nutraceuticals using particle-stabilised Pickering emulsions in place of the surfactant stabilised materials.
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