Partners:
11. Instituto del Frio-IdF (CSIC), Spain; 4. Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies (IMARES), The Netherlands, 41. MOERE, Norway; 34. Plant Research International (PRI), The Netherlands, 13. TNO Nutrition, The Netherlands; 49. Ashtown Food Research Centre,Teagasc (AFRC), Ireland, 24. Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food (FRCFN), Germany; 17. National Research Institute on Agriculture and Fisheries (IPIMAR), Portugal; 26. University of Tromsų (UIT), Norway.
The main objective of the project is:
- To develop innovative functional seafood products from both capture (under-utilised) and farmed fish, containing health-promoting compounds aimed at improving intestinal health, lipid metabolism, as well as the potential prevention of cancer.
Some of these compounds, e.g. (antioxidant) dietary fibres of marine or vegetable origin, will be incorporated as ingredients to restructured and fillet based products where as others, e.g. Se-(alkyl)selenocysteine from vegetable origin, will be incorporated via dietary modulation of fish. The functional seafood products will meet their goal of obtaining the quality and convenience characteristics required and accepted by (target) consumer groups.
In order to fulfil the main objective, the project has been designed with a consumer-oriented approach and with a multidisciplinary team. The working hypothesis is that consumers would like functional seafood, which at the same time is convenient, easy to prepare. Therefore consumer studies will help to develop the seafood product concept at the beginning and during the project. Incorporation of high quality raw materials as well as the retention/changes/losses of the functionality of the components present in, and introduced to seafood will be addressed during processing and storage in order to meet the best functional (health) and organoleptic characteristics in the seafood products. This will be complemented for some selected formulations with intervention studies for health claims. Additionally, some of the functional ingredients, e.g. Se-alkylselenocysteines, to be incorporated to seafood have been only recently obtained and tested for health effects, and have not been previously used in other functional foods. This implies that this project also includes a research and development component on the production and/or scaling up of some of these ingredients that can assure the commercial exploitation of the functional seafood products.
The research within the project is described in five major blocks of activities
Read about this and the other projects in RTD Pillar 4 Seafood from source to consumer product in the Eurofish magazine article
Safe, nutritious, healthy products that are a pleasure to eat
