Understanding stickiness of sticky-cohesive foods

Kazemeini, Seyedmostafa (2024) Understanding stickiness of sticky-cohesive foods. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.

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Abstract

Stickiness is a textural characteristic of food that is a difficult area of research from both a human perception and instrumental measurement perspective. For this reason, different approaches were used in the present work to explore the challenges. Since the final stages of oral food processing lead to a sticky-cohesive texture, it was hypothesised that the sticky-cohesive texture would reach a certain level in all model foods of the present work.

The first chapter of this thesis systematically addresses a comprehensive and detailed literature review on topics related to stickiness, such as failure mechanisms related to the different methods used in the present study (instrumental and physiological methods).

Thereafter, various topics were covered in the Materials and Methods section. Efforts to develop six model foods with different degrees of stickiness are presented (section 2.1.1). Sensory measurement (section 2.2) and physiological experiments (section 2.3) are then presented to provide a deeper comprehension of human responses to different levels of stickiness. In the physiological section the influence of the stickiness of model foods on electromyography parameters are measured by recording the activity of mastication muscles (temporalis and masseter). In addition, the texture

analyser is used as an instrumental method to measure the surface stickiness of model foods by performing a compression-separation test (section 2.4.1). In order to investigate the internal properties of model foods, a stress relaxation test is also carried out using a rheometer (section 2.4.2). In the present study, the compression-separation test represents the surface stickiness of model foods without catastrophic changes in the sample, while the stress relaxation test provides insight into the rheological behaviour of model foods and their responses to applied deformation. The other instrumental approach is to measure the bulk modulus of the model foods. This measurement was initiated by developing an instrument to measure bulk modulus and establishing a specific protocol to accurately measure bulk modulus values.

Carrying out the above measurements resulted in the collection of a huge amount of data. The different nature of the data (e.g., electromyography data that is not monotonic) was a reason to approach the data analysis with different statistical methods (e.g., Pearson correlation and ANOVA). The results for each specific method are presented and discussed in chapter 3. In addition, possible correlations between sensory, electromyographic and instrumental measurements are also explored. In addition, the results of each method were also correlated with each other to find out whether they correlate with each other or not (sections 3.2.2, 3.2.4, 3.2.5, 3.3.2, 3.3.3).

The final step of the present work is to bring together all the data from the instrumental and sensory analysis by performing a principal component analysis to draw the overall picture of how human perception of stickiness in terms of muscle activity correlates with surface stickiness and rheological properties (section 3.4) to establish if instrumental parameters can predict perceived stickiness.

Item Type: Thesis (University of Nottingham only) (PhD)
Supervisors: Rosenthal, Andrew
Yakubov, Gleb
Keywords: food, food evaluation, stickiness, texture, chewing, mastication, swallowing
Subjects: Q Science > QP Physiology > QP1 Physiology (General) including influence of the environment
T Technology > TX Home economics
Faculties/Schools: UK Campuses > Faculty of Science > School of Biosciences
Item ID: 74258
Depositing User: Kazemeini, Seyed
Date Deposited: 01 Aug 2024 14:44
Last Modified: 01 Aug 2024 14:44
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/74258

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