Moringa oleifera Lam. as functional food in Cuba: scientific bases
Keywords:
functional food, antioxidant, isoquercetin, Moringa oleifera, secondary metabolitesAbstract
Introduction: Moringa has high contents of macromolecules and active ingredients that are a source for functional foods. The agricultural and technological innovations applied in the Moringa agroindustry set the guidelines that benefits consumers who require a food system with higher quality and greater confidence.
Objectives: To establish the scientific bases for the use of Moringa oleifera Lam. as functional food in Cuba.
Methods: The agricultural study was developed at the Futuro Lechero farm. Bromatological analyzes were performed by near infra-red spectroscopy, thin layer chromatography and high-pressure liquid chromatography. The biological effects were evaluated by spectrophotometric methods and classical techniques.
Results and Discussion: Innovations done in the Moringa agroindustry decreased the microbiological load under or equal to 103. The pigments did not show significant differences for the planting frames evaluated. There was an increase in metabolism in densities from 10,000 to 42,000 plants/ha. Two Cuban standards (NC 1344:2020 and 1374:2020) were elaborated for the first time to obtain safe Moringa products for human consumption with their quality specifications. Bromatological and protein consistency greater than 30% was demonstrated without differences neither by season of the year, nor by ecotype studied, with a value of 1.98% of the active principle of isoquercitin that confirmed the positive results of biological effects.
Conclusions: The agroindustrial technology developed with good practices of production, quality and harmlessness, allowed the preservation of the contents of metabolites present in the plant with biological activity and the production of products based on Moringa oleifera Lam. as functional food.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The journal Anales de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba protects copyright, and operates with a Creative Commons License 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 4.0). By publishing in it, authors allow themselves to copy, reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate their work and generate derivative works, as long as the original author is cited and acknowledged. They do not allow, however, the use of the original work for commercial or lucrative purposes.
The authors authorize the publication of their writings, retaining the authorship rights, and assigning and transferring to the magazine all the rights protected by the intellectual property laws that govern in Cuba, which imply editing to disseminate the work.
Authors may establish additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the journal (for example, placing it in an institutional repository or publishing it in a book), with recognition of having been first published in this journal.
To learn more, see https://creativecommons.org
