Carotenoids Essay

INTRODUCTION

Today, there is a demand among consumers for food products that promote human health and well-being. The food scientists are, therefore, attempting to fortify foods with health-promoting ingredients. Incorporation of bioactive compounds– for example, vitamins, probiotics, bioactive peptides, and cell reinforcements etc.– into food system give a straightforward approach to create novel functional foods that may have physiological advantages or lessen the dangers of diseases. Some of these are essential for human wellbeing (vitamins and minerals), whereas others provide health benefits beyond the basic nutrition (nutraceuticals). The incorporation of these bioactive into the food products simply in their pure form is hardly possible due to various physicochemical and biological constrains (McClements,

They are lipophilic bioactive components and responsible for bright red, yellow and orange colors in many fruits and vegetables. They are mainly found in chloroplast and chromoplast of plants and photosynthetic bacteria. There are six types of carotenoids including; α-carotene, β-carotene, lycopene, lutein, zeaxanthin, and crocetin. Carotenoids with molecules containing oxygen are known as xanthophylls (lutein and zeaxanthin), while oxygen free carotenoids are known as carotenes (β-carotene and lycopene). There are several human health benefits that have been related with carotenoids. They have been proposed to exhibit protection against a number of health related disorders such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, muscular degeneration, prostate cancer. β-carotene is an important individual from the carotenoid family that has received specific consideration because of its high provitamin A and antioxidant activity. Thus, there is a strong eagerness for utilizing β-carotene and other carotenoids as functional food ingredients in the food