Herbal Bioactives and Food Fortification

Recent major shifts in global health care management policy have been instrumental in renewing interest in herbal medicine. However, literature on the development of products from herbs is often scattered and narrow in scope. Herbal Bioactives and Food Fortification: Extraction and Formulation provides information on all aspects of the extraction of biological actives from plants and the development of dietary supplements and fortified food using herbal extracts.

The book begins with a brief survey of the use of herbs in different civilizations and traces the evolution of herbal medicine, including the emergence of nutraceuticals from the discipline of ethnopharmacology and the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978. It moves on to describe various aspects of the extraction process, including selection of plant species, quality control of raw materials, the comminution of herbs, and the selection of solvents. It also describes the optimization of extraction in relation to response surface methodology before describing uses of herbal extracts in food supplements and fortified foods.

With special attention paid to stability analysis and the masking of tastes, the book gives an overview of the formulation of various types of tablets, capsules, and syrups using herbal extracts. It also describes the benefits of foods fortified with herbal extracts such as soups, yogurt, sauces, mayonnaise, pickles, chutneys, jams, jellies, marmalades, cheese, margarine, sausages, bread, and biscuits, as well as some beverages.

Herbal Bioactives and Food Fortification covers the fundamental steps in herbal extraction and processing in a single volume. It explains how to choose, optimize, analyze, and use extracts for fortification, making it an excellent source for nutraceutical researchers and practitioners in science and industry.