Dairy products carrageenan

As with carrageenan, another seaweed extract, the ability to bind to calcium makes alginates useful in dairy products as a thickener. It also makes alginates useful as wound dressings, where they absorb fluids, and stop bleeding, and act as a scaffold. 

Carrageenan is widely used in dairy products because it forms complexes with calcium and milk proteins. It thickens and helps suspend cocoa particles in chocolate milk. It stabilizes ice cream to protect it from thawing and refreezing, and enables it to hold more air. 

Because of its gelling ability, carrageenan is widely used as food thickeners and emulsion stabilizers in the food industry and is present in many dairy products including less expensive ice-cream and other dessert products providing a smooth, creamy texture. It is used as a stabilizer in foods, such as chocolate milk. 

Other hydrocolloids, such as carrageenan, agar, and xanthan gum and are able to reduce syneresis of some dairy products [55-79]. 

A second interfacially active component may also induce the surface activity of weakly surface-active proteins due to strong intermolecular interactions. Electrostatic interactions from anionic bile salts enhance the adsorption of cationic chitosan on emulsion droplets emulsified by using a mixture of phospholipids, cholesterol and such bile salts. Carrageenan interacts strongly with milk proteins, which is of importance in relation to the association to emulsions and to its application in stabilizing neutral dairy products. 

Carrageenans find widespread use in the food industry notably in meat and dairy products. They are also used, for example, in air fresheners to control the rate of release of the fragrance. 

Lambda does not gel and is used to thicken dairy products. It has an ester sulfate content of about 32-39 % and no content of 3, 6-AG. X-type is readily soluble in cold or hot aqueous solution. X-carrageenan exhibits the highest antioxidant and free radical scavenging activity. 

The primary applications for carrageenans in the food industry are in dairy and processed meat products (Ohshima, 1998). Carrageenans can form gels with milk and water and can be used to coat meats to help retain moisture, seasonings, and flavors and to serve as a protective barrier (BeMiller and Whistler, 1996). From a human health perspective, it has been reported that carrageenans have antihuman immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 activity and some anticoagulant properties (Vlieghe et al., 2002). 

There are many ways to microencapsulate active components, such as spray drying, film coating, coacervation, carrageenan entrapment, molecular encapsulation using P-cyclodextrin, double emulsions, liposomes, and microemulsions (Vilstrup, 2001). Of these, spray drying is currently the best technology available to the food industry to produce stable, cost-effective, microencapsulated ingredients or products. Spray dryers, first constmcted in 1878 (Hayashi, 1989), are now widely used in the dairy industry and, in a modified form, by infant formulae manufacturers. 

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