Nutritional composition antioxidant activity

Many methods are available for determining food antioxidant capacity, which is an important topic in food and nutrition research. However, there is a great need to standardize these methods because the frequent lack of an actual substrate in the procedure, the system composition, and the method of inducing oxidation could limit their accuracy. In fact, antioxidant activities in complex systems cannot be evaluated satisfactorily using a single test, and several test procedures may be required. The search for more specific assays that can be more directly related to oxidative deterioration of foods and biological systems should be the objective of future investigations. 

Unlike the common walnut, there is virtually no information available in peer-reviewed literature about the nutritional composition and value of heartnut. The polyphenolic and lipid compositions of the heartnut and how they contribute to the total antioxidant activities have been recently reported [2,3]. This chapter provides a more comprehensive overview about this special tree nut and its potential as a healthy food for consumers and a value-added new crop for growers. Due to lack of information about heartnut, literature reviews on the nutritional composition will mainly be on the common walnut. Furthermore, we will focus our discussions on the phenolic, tocopherol, and fatty acid contents and their contribution to human health through cholesterol reduction and antioxidative properties. 

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