Interfacial Rheology and Encapsulation Techniques for the Development of Functional Foods

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Imagine eating a delicious meal that contains all the calories and nutrients that your body needs, and leaves you feeling energetic and satisfied without a need or desire to eat again for 24, 48, or even 72 hours. While a "controlled-release" food product like this would not be intended to replace regular food, it could dramatically improve the quality of life for anyone who has difficulty eating regular meals due to physical or circumstantial limitations. This includes children and elderly people who have difficulty eating regularly, cancer patients, disaster victims, and people with restrictive work environments such as astronauts and military personnel.Producing this technology will be very challenging and will require significant advances in basic scientific knowledge as well as engineering tools. These advances will also need to span multiple fields of research such as physiology, psychology, physics, and engineering. In the future, interdisciplinary collaborations with other research groups will be necessary to achieve this goal. However, to begin, this research program will focus on establishing two smaller, but important building blocks to support this goal: 1. Fundamental understanding of the physics of emulsions and foams, which make up a significant portion of the final products or processing steps in producing food. 2. Techniques and materials for the encapsulation of nutraceutical ingredients into food products for enhancing the nutritional value.In both cases the research will involve three main activities: - Development of new analytical tools - Application of these tools to facilitate the development and validation of mathematical models - Creation of collaborations with companies to use these tools and models to aid in product formulation and development.