Nutritional optimization and starch and protein digestibility of pasta made with gluten free African cereal and legume flours

Abstract

Nowadays, malnutrition (i.e. over and undernutrition) is a major public health issue. This reflects energy and macro and micronutrient imbalances. Among strategies to fight malnutrition, governmental food programs, fortification and nutritional optimization of staple food can be alternatively or concomitantly adopted. Pasta is one of the most popular staple foods. Traditionally made from wheat, its formulation has been improved by including legumes beside wheat. The next effort for improving its formulation would be to use raw materials from climate-smart crops. Our study takes place in the European H2020 Innofood Africa project federating European and African countries on the development of climate-smart crops and their use in the context of a balanced diet. It aims to develop new nutritionally optimized pasta made from gluten free African raw materials adapted to the climate transition e.g. drought resistance, low input requirement. Raw materials are cowpea, faba bean and bambara legume flours; teff, finger millet and amaranth cereal grain flours and additional nutritious raw materials such as orange fleshed sweet potato and amaranth leave flours. Nutritional and antinutritional composition of all flours were determined (protein, amino acids content, starch, sugar, fibres, vitamins, minerals, phytic acids, trypsin inhibitor). This constituted a data base for nutritional optimization of pasta by mathematical programming. In order to cover adults needs, the following criteria were selected: an amino acid chemical score above 110 taking into account process and cooking losses, an omega 6/omega 3 ratio closest to 5, a fiber quantity for 100g of pasta less than 25g, quantities of iron, zinc, B9 vitamin and beta carotene at less equal to recommendations and minimization of anti-nutritional factors. The best formulations covering the nutritional requirements, mainly based on cowpea, teff, amaranth leaves flours, have been selected. They were processed by a