Wheat food uses

In agriculture and food, NIR has been a powerful tool for decades. All shipments of grain leaving US ports are analyzed for moisture, fat, protein, and starch via NIR. Processed foods are also a prime venue for NIR percent of fat in cheese spread, hardness of wheat, and freshness of meats are just some of the applications in food. 

In agricultural applications, the most commonly analyzed constituents are water, protein, starch, sugars, and fiber [16-20]. Such physical or chemical functions such as hardness of wheat, minerals, and food values have no actual relation to chemicals seen in the NIR. These are usually done by inferential spectroscopy. That is, the effect of minerals or the relationship of the spectra to in vitro reactions is used in lieu of chemical analyses to NIR active constituents. Considering that all shipments of grain from the US since the 1980s have been cleared by NIR, it can be argued that this is a critical application of the technique. 

The wheat bran used in these studies was milled for us from a single lot of Waldron hard red spring wheat. Other foods and diet ingredients were purchased from local food suppliers. Data from HS-I was analyzed statistically by Student s paired t test, each subject acting as his own control. A three-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to test for significant differences betwen diet treatments, periods and individuals in HS-II and HS-III. 

Outside of the use of cellulose for papermaking, starch is the most widely used plant-derived carbohydrate for non-food uses. Around 60 million tonnes of raw starch are produced per year for food and non-food uses. The US accounts for most of the world s production, utilising starch from maize, which accounts for over 80% of world production. The starch market in the US is driven by the large isoglucose sweetener market and now increasingly by the growing bioethanol market, which uses maize as a fermentation feedstock. Europe derives most of its starch from wheat and potatoes, which account for 8% and 5% of world starch production, respectively. The other main source of starch is cassava (tapioca), produced in South East Asia. Small amounts of oat, barley and rice are also exploited for starch production. Many edible beans are also rich in starches, but are not commonly exploited for non-food uses. 

Monophosphorylation pastes made from starch monophosphates also have greater clarity, viscosity and stability than unmodified starches,64 but are sensitive to salts, especially polyvalent cations.65 Variability in residual ash can lead to variability in the viscosity of monophosphorylated starches. Monophosphate substitution also lowers the gelatinization temperature at 0.07 DS, a value much greater than is found in food starches, the gelatinization temperature is below room temperature. Native potato starch contains 0.07 to 0.09% bound phosphorus and wheat starch contains 0.055% phosphoms, primarily as phosphoglycerides in the latter case. The FDA allows up to 0.4% phosphate as phosphoms.58 Monophosphates were used commercially in the US until about 1970. 

Com, tapioca, potato and wheat starches are the most commonly used starches in the US and Europe. In the US, 95% of the starch is made from corn, an amount representing 3.4% of the total com crop, excluding that wet-milled to make sweeteners (see Chapter 22) and alcohol11124 (see Chapter 2). In Europe, about 60% of the starch produced is made from com and about 20% each from potato and wheat.12 In select regions, rice, sorghum, arrowroot, sago and other starches are also used. The relative utility of these starches in foods is a function of differences in viscosity, stability to... 

Both cellulose and starch are, of course, enormously important to us. Generally speaking, we use them in very much the same way as the plant does. We use cellulose for its structural properties as wood for houses, as cotton or rayon for clothing, as paper for communication and packaging. We use starch as a food potatoes, corn, wheat, rice, cassava, etc. 

---