Oil structuring for improving healthy and sustainable diets

In response to the nutritional and environmental issues that emerged recently on fats, there has been in the last decades an exponential growth of research in the field of oleogel and oleogelation. Oleogels are defined as semisolid materials entrapping large quantities of oil. These innovative materials are explored mainly as promising solutions to reduce trans and saturated fatty acids in foods, but also as potential delivery systems for bioactive molecules. Despite the interest in oleogels, the use of oleogels in food industries is still in the early stages. This can be attributed to several challenges associated with Regulatory constraints, imposing restrictions on the use of some proposed gelators, or lack of knowledge about the functionalities of oleogels in complex food systems and their further behavior in the human body. This doctoral project was designed to increase the knowledge surrounding oleogel and oleogelation. To this aim, both conventional and unconventional oleogelation strategies have been explored. The initial part of this research was dedicated to the study of the oil structuring ability of lipophilic gelators, considering the impact of oil minor components on oleogel structure as well as the potential use of novel technologies for a process-driven structuring of fats. In particular, the potentiality of high-pressure technology was considered. The second section was focused on exploring innovative oleogelation procedures mainly considering the ability of nanostructured porous materials to entrap oil. In this context cellulose, pea proteins, and whey proteins were considered as oleogelators. Finally, the third part of the thesis was designed to study the fate of oleogels in the human body to close the circle in studying structure-function relationships. The outcomes of the research contribute to increasing the existing knowledge on oleogels and oleogelation strategies, taking in mind the importance of improving the nutritional functionalities of the existing lipid-containing foods as well as in the development of novel foods. I hope that the thesis results will be useful in assisting researchers and food managers in the attempt to design healthy and sustainable food products assuring at the same time a memorable eating experience during food consumption. Every food innovation is likely doomed to failure if the pleasure of consumers is not reached.