Food Research International 36 (2003) 307308

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Editorial

Starch research over the years

Across all civilizations, cultures and continents,

starch has been the major source of energy in human
diet since times immemorial. Primary sources of starch
in human diet vary according to the region, culture and
climate. Cereals like rice, wheat and corn are the leading
starch crops all over the world. Rice was rst domesticated in China and has been a major starch source in
Asia for millennia, and today over half of the worlds
population depends on it for its nutritional needs.
Cultivation of wheat began at least 10,000 years ago in
the regions comprising modern day Turkey and Egypt,
and with the advent of time this crop became a major
starch source in Europe and North America. Corn was
cultivated in the Americas since pre-historic times and
was brought to Europe by Spaniards in the second half
of the last millennium. Today, corn has become a very
signicant source of starch all over the Western Hemisphere. Others sources of starch include tuber crops
such as potato and cassava, and sago, which is derived
from trunks of palm trees. Potato was introduced in
Europe in the 16th century, and has since then gained
an important place in both European and North
American diets. Cassava is used widely in parts of
Southeast Asia, South America and Africa, while sago
is widely consumed in regions of the Southwest Pacic.
With the advent of food science as a major scientic
discipline in the last century, researchers in academia
and industry alike have focused their eorts towards
unraveling the mysteries of starch and enhancing its
applications with the help of chemical modications.
This special issue of Food Research International brings
together some of the important research being conducted on starch in the areas of structure, functionality
and processing.
Starch structure and composition has been a major
area of research, and it has been established that starch
consists primarily of branched and linear chains of glucose molecules, known as amylopectin and amylose,
respectively. Starch is present in an ordered crystalline
form in starch granules as conrmed by use of various
techniques including light microspcopy and scanning
electron microscopy. The ordered structure of starch is
destroyed on hydration of starch granules in the presence of heat and moisture, a process broadly referred

to as gelatinization. Gelatinization is an important process which increases the digestibility of starch, and
changes its rheological properties that are very important from the processing point of view. Gelatinization
temperatures range from 60 to 85  C depending on several factors including the source of starch, relative
amounts of amylose and amylopectin, and amount of
moisture available for hydration. Retrogradation is an
inverse process, which tends to revert gelatinized starch
to a partially crystalline structure under favorable conditions such as that occurring during refrigerated storage. Use of instrumental techniques such as dierential
scanning calorimetry, X-ray diraction and rapid viscoanalysis have greatly increased our understanding of
starch gelatinization during processing and retrogradation during storage, and the accompanying changes in its crystallinity and rheology. This constitutes
another important area of study, which is reected in
some of the papers in this issue.
With advances in starch research, it has ceased to be
just a source of energy and has found a myriad other
applications in both food and non-food areas. Modied
starches such as cross-linked starch, substituted starch,
acid hydrolyzed starch and pregelatinized starch have
several functional uses as viscosity modiers, thickeners,
texture enhancers and avor encapsulation agents, in a
host of products including soups, sauces, bakery products, dairy products, and confectionery. Dwindling
resources of non-renewable fossil fuels and the negative
environmental impact of use of plastics has led
researchers to focus eorts on utilizing starch as a biodegradable and virtually inexhaustible raw material for
producing packaging materials including lms, foams
and molded packages. These non-dietary uses of starch
are an increasing focus of research as is evident from the
papers in this issue.
New areas of interest in starch research include the
use of cutting-edge tools such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
to study moisture interactions with starch during processing and storage, the hot issue of acrylamides, and
development of new processing techniques. NMR and
MRI techniques are very useful for understanding
phenomena like water mobility and the relationships

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Editorial / Food Research International 36 (2003) 307308

between water and chemical reactivity, microbial activity,

and physiochemical and structural property changes in
starch-based foods. This is an important key to eective
food R&D, as well as quality control in processing and
storage. An important emerging issue for starch-based
processed foods is acrylamide. Acrylamide is a chemical
used in manufacture of plastics and for purifying water.
It has also been found to be a by-product in starchy
foods baked or fried at very high temperatures, such as
potato crisps, crisp breads, and cereals. At low levels
(for example, below 0.5 ppm in water) acrylamide does
not pose any health risks, but at higher doses it has been
shown to be a carcinogen in animal studies using mice.
In April of 2002, tests conducted by Swedish researchers
identied levels of 1200 micrograms per kg (or 1200
ppm) acrylamide in potato crisps. Compared to the EU
safety levels, the potato crisps studied contained 2400
times more acrylamide. This study has led to a urry of
symposia and meetings involving regulatory authorities
and scientists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It is
clear that many more detailed studies are needed to
study the eect of high temperature processing of starch
on acrylamide formation and also on the eect of

acrylamide on humans. In the light of this development,

new starch processing technologies utilizing minimal
thermal treatment need to be explored. Supercritical
uid extrusion, which is of particular interest to this
author, is an important new technology that utilizes
sub-100  C temperatures for processing of starch-based
snack and breakfast cereal products. Along with several
other texture and structure related benets, this allows
addition of heat-sensitive ingredients such as avors,
colors, whey protein and vitamins in-line with minimal
impact during processing. The low processing temperatures would also lead to a minimal presence of acrylamide, although this needs to be investigated. It is
heartening to note that this special issue of the Food
Research International dwells on some of these new
areas in starch research.
Sajid Alavi
Extrusion Research Center
Department of Grain Science and Industry
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506, USA
E-mail address: salavi@wheat.ksu.edu