Chemical components in food products

Eating is a necessity, because our organism is made up of 60,000 billion cells with a permanent need for food; but the act of eating goes far beyond simply meeting nutritional requirements. The food we ingest will therefore provide the cells with nutritive constituents (energetic, plastic, indispensable nutrients) as well as beneficial non-nutritive substances (e.g.: flavoring agents) or sometimes undesirable ones (toxic substances and/or contaminants).

Foods are complex mixtures of many and varied substances. Their immediate analysis enables us to distinguish between the inorganic and the organic. The study carried out here will be limited to the biological and physiological approach to foods, considering only nutritional substances.

Lipids are a heterogeneous group of water-insoluble organic compounds (marked hydrophobic character). This physical characteristic of lipids is at the root of the group's chemical heterogeneity. However, the vast majority of lipids are fatty acid esters.

Carbohydrates, commonly known as "sugars and starches", are a homogeneous group of essentially ternary compounds whose gross formula contains twice as many H atoms as O atoms (as in water), hence the Anglo-Saxon name "carbohydrates". Chemically speaking, simple sugars or oses are polyalcohols with a reducing, aldehyde or ketone function. Many carbohydrates are polymers of oses (osides), which are released by hydrolysis of the osidic bond. Because of their chemical make-up, carbohydrates are very hydrophilic substances: oses and oligosides are water-soluble, but ose polymers (e.g. starch or cellulose) are insoluble macromolecules, some of which make up dietary fibers or carbohydrate indigestibles.

Dietary fibers include all components that cannot be broken down by the enzymes of the TD digestive tract, which promote intestinal transit and the evacuation of waste, and which therefore have the capacity to incorporate large quantities of water.

Proteins (from the Greek protos = first) are the most important organic constituents (quantitatively and qualitatively) in living organisms. They are quaternary organic compounds made up of C, H, O and N. Amino acids make up a vast group (over 200), of which only the twenty involved in the elaboration of living matter are well known. Their polymerization leads to short (peptides) or longer (proteins) amino acid chains. But the predominant feature of these polymers is that the order in which the amino acids are linked is not arbitrary, but determined in the form of a sequence imposed by genetic information. Proteins are therefore the specific molecules par excellence of living matter; they are constitutive for the most part, but they also play a fundamental functional role,...