Application of a sensory-instrumental tool to study apple texture characteristics shaped by altitude and time of harvest.

Background: Texture is important in the preferences of apple consumers. Of the pre-harvest factors affecting fruit quality and especially texture, altitude and subsequent climatic conditions are crucial, determining differences in the physiological mechanisms of fruit growth, ripening stage and chemical composition, as demonstrated by several studies. This work applies a detailed sensory-instrumental protocol developed in a previous paper to investigate the impact of altitude, time of harvest and their cross-effect on sensory characteristics of apple, with a focus on texture.

Sweet taste in apple: the role of sorbitol, individual sugars, organic acids and volatile compounds.

Sweetness is one of the main drivers of consumer preference, and thus is given high priority in apple breeding programmes. Due to the complexity of sweetness evaluation, soluble solid content (SSC) is commonly used as an estimation of this trait. Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that SSC and sweet taste are poorly correlated.

Food neophobia and its relation with olfactory ability in common odour identification.

Food neophobia is strictly connected with many different aspects of human feeding, ranging from food preferences to food choice, from active chemosensory exploration of the world (sniffing and tasting) to physiological responses associated with alertness. Therefore in this study, we tested the ability of 167 participants (54 women and 113 men, aged between 20 and 59 years old) to correctly identify 36 common odours, and we verified whether such ability could be related to their level of neophobia toward food and to demographic parameters (i.e.

In vitro bioaccessibility and gut biotransformation of polyphenols present in the water-insoluble cocoa fraction.

Scope: Cocoa, especially the water-insoluble cocoa fraction (WICF), is a rich source of polyphenols. In this study, sequential in vitro digestion of the WICF with gastrointestinal enzymes as well as its bacterial fermentation in a human colonic model system were carried out to investigate bioaccessibility and biotransformation of WICF polyphenols, respectively.

Methods And Results: The yield of each enzymatic digestion step and the total antioxidant capacity (TAC) were measured and solubilized phenols were characterized by MS/MS.