Gluten Free Products - Nutritional Aspects

At first gluten-free food products were a necessity for people with medical needs but with time, gluten-free products became popular among the masses who wanted to have a gluten-free diet. Due to its growing demand it became important for researchers to find ways to make gluten-free products more nutritional.

Naturally occurring gluten-free products are rich in fat and proteins and thus they increase the calorie count of the diet they are made a part of. On the other hand developing gluten-free products requires substituting gluten with additives and wheat flour with highly refined starches which in turn leads to food products having higher fat content and glycemic index. To overcome these problems and to make gluten-free products more nutritional, hydrocolloids are substituted in place of gluten to make the food products rich in fibre and to lower their glycemic index.

As wheat-based bakery products form a basic part of our diets, extensive research was done to develop gluten-free products having acceptable nutritional properties. The development of gluten-free bakery products of similar characteristics to wheat-based products requires wheat flour to be replaced by a mixture of flour and starch. These development processes were never easy in the first place but when gluten-free variants of products like bread, pasta and cookies are to be obtained, the development becomes a lot more difficult as for these products gluten network development is required. Also, as gluten-free counterparts are rich in starch they lack proteins and fibres.

To overcome all these problems various methods were developed like adding hydrocolloids, a gluten substitute to products which require gluten network development or explicitly adding proteins and fibres to increase the nutritional value of gluten-free products. But not all gluten-free counterparts are hard to obtain, products like cakes, wafers and crepes do not require a gluten network development so they are easier to develop. As of today, additives and enzymes are being added to gluten-free products to make them as similar to their wheat-based products as possible but since the functionalities of these enzymes and additives has been a subject of discrepancy; it’s still a topic of research.