New food technologies and processes and their impact on nutrition.

An evaluation of new technologies already applied or still under investigation has shown that those procedures allow a mild treatment mostly of liquid food materials. If also Osmotic Processing, Ionising Irradiation, Carbon-Dioxide High-Pressure-Gas treatment, Ultra-Sound treatment and Gas-Plasma treatment are considered a large array of new processes is available for processing of food with minimum impact on compounds of nutritional relevance. Those processes must however be operated under very special conditions in order to comply with hygienic standards. Since all this processes require very sophisticated equipment it is too early at the moment to predict which one of the New Technologies will survive the fierce competition with the classic and well established processes and which do not fall under the Novel Food Regulation of the EU. It must be stated however that the pressure which did arise from the New Technologies has initiated many developments in the area of the classical technologies which had at the very end an impact also on the quality of products produced with those procedures.