1Center for Innovative Food (CiFOOD), Department of Food Science, Aarhus University, AgroFood Park 48, Aarhus N 8200, Denmark.
2InnograinLab, Food Technology Division, Department of Agricultural Engineering, University of Valladolid, Spain.
Apple pomace (POM), a major byproduct of the apple juice and cider industries, represents a promising and sustainable source of plant cell walls impregnated with polyphenols. Incorporating fruit and vegetable pomaces into staple foods like bread offers a promising strategy to enhance their nutritional value while simultaneously reducing waste and improving resource efficiency. The successful incorporation of POM, like other pomaces, into food products presents an additional technological challenge in maintaining consumer acceptability. POM contains up to ~90% (dry matter) total dietary fibre. Similar to other insoluble fibres, pomace has a high water absorption capacity, leading to competition with gluten and starch for available moisture. Consequently, incorporating POM into bread formulations may result in insufficient hydration of these key structuring components, as observed with other insoluble fibers. In a recent study, we showed that incorporating just 5% POM into wheat dough doubled the total polyphenol content. Results also showed that co-formulating POM-containing breads with psyllium and pectin effectively counteracted the negative effects of apple pomace on water dynamics in wheat bread, significantly increasing dough and crumb hydration. Given the combined interactions between starch, dietary fiber and polyphenols, and the well-known health promising effects of polyphenol-impregnated fibers, such as POM material, the aim of this work was to study the bioaccesibility of polyphenols at subclass and individual compound levels in bread formulations and the effect of POM and co-formulated soluble fibers to modulate starch digestion (Figure 1). Polyphenol profiling was conducted using non-targeted screening and semi-quantification via LC-ESI-QTOF-MS/MS, and digestion was simulated using the standardized INFOGEST 2.0 in vitro protocol with pooled human saliva. Bread formulations included 100% wheat (W), or breads containing 5% psyllium (W:PSY) or 5% pectin (W:P), each with or without 5% POM. The analysis of polyphenol bioaccessibility in POM-containing bread, revealed distinct bioaccesibility patterns trends depending on the polyphenol subclass. Hydroxybenzoic acids (HBAs) and dihydrochalcones showed a marked increase in bioaccesibility from the oral (20-30%) to the intestinal phase (30-40%), whereas the bioaccesibility of hydroxycinnamic acids (HCAs) and flavonols remained low (<30%) across all the digestion phases, with bioaccesibility significantly declining in the intestinal phase. Flavanols (monomeric and oligomeric) remained undetectable in all phases. In general, the type of co-formulated soluble polysaccharide critically influenced polyphenol bioaccessibility, with psyllium promoting intestinal release of HBAs and dihydrochalcones while concurrently reducing the bioaccessibility of HCAs. In contrast, pectin consistently reduced the bioaccessibility of all polyphenol subclasses across all digestion phases, which limits polyphenol release but may favor colonic delivery. Interestingly, at individual compound level, psyllium induced increased bioaccessibility for several compounds during gastric and intestinal phases, but these did not cluster by core structure (chemical subclass), indicating that digestive behavior is governed by compound-specific structural features rather than broad class-level traits. In general, most individual polyphenols showed reduced bioaccessibility in the presence of either POM or soluble fibers. In terms of starch digestion, POM and the co-formulation of POM with soluble fiber significantly reduced starch digestibility, with the pectin-POM combination exhibiting the lowest extent of starch digestion.