Synergistic effects of oleogelators in tailoring the properties of oleogels: A review.

Abstract

Conventional solid fats play a crucial role as an ingredient in many processedfoods. However, these fats contain a high amount of saturated fats andtransfats.Legislations and dietary recommendations related to these two types of fats setforth as a consequence of evidence showing their deleterious health impact havetriggered the attempts to find alternate tailor-made lipids for these solid fats.Oleogels is considered as a novel alternative, which has reduced saturated fatand notransfat content. In addition to mimicking the distinctive characteristicsof solid fats, oleogels can be developed to contain a high amount of polyunsatu-rated fatty acids and used to deliver bioactives. Although there has been a dra-maticriseintheinterestindevelopingoleogelsforfoodapplicationsoverthepastdecade, none of them has been commercially used in foods so far due to the defi-ciency in their crystal network structure, particularly in monocomponent gels.Very recently, there is a surge in the interest in using of combination of gelatorsdue to the synergistic effects that aid in overcoming the drawbacks in monocom-ponent gels. However, currently, there is no comprehensive insight into syner-gism among oleogelators reported in recent studies. Therefore, a comprehensiveintuition into the findings reported on synergism is crucial to fill this gap. Theobjective of this review is to give a comprehensive insight into synergism amonggelators based on recent literature. This paper also identifies the future researchpropositions towards developing oleogels capable of exactly mimicking the prop-ertiesofconventionalsolidfatstobridgethegapbetweenlaboratoryresearchandthe food industry.