Natural Bioactive Antioxidants for the Enrichment of Seafood

摘要

Exploring new, effective natural antioxidants for the food industry and consumers demanding natural ingredients in foodstuffs has intensified in recent years. This has a special relevance for fatty and semi-fatty fish and fish products having high amounts of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), prone to undergo oxidation and rancidity. This work proposes the use of flavonoids obtained from different agrofood byproducts as natural and bioactive antioxidants in fish products. Different parameters were found relevant. Properties such as the influence of the molecular structure on the redox and chelating capacities, the distribution of the antioxidant in the oxidation sites, and the incidence of the antioxidant on the endogenous redox balance of fish muscle will be discussed. Besides increasing the shelf-life of functional seafood preparations, the addition of some of these compounds may be beneficial for the prevention of cancer due to the induction of apoptosis in different cancer cells. Thus, the product based on fish muscle supplemented with bioactive antioxidants appears to be an interesting and stable functional food offering the combined action of n-3 PUFA and natural polyphenols.