CHAPTER 10: Stability of Bioactive Peptides During Processing

Proteins and peptides are very important nutritional and functional constituents of foods that may be subject to changes derived from either food processing or gastrointestinal digestion. Some of these changes may affect their functional properties and also their biological activities and, therefore, it is important for them to be protected. There have been numerous recent developments to ensure the delivery of bioactive peptides with good stability. Such techniques are based either on the encapsulation of bioactive peptides or on the modification of the peptide structure in order to increase their stability against any food processing treatment such as heating, cooling, pH changes, NaCl treatment and also hydrolysis during gastrointestinal digestion.