Nutritional safety of commercial bakery products manufactured in Portugal

Comunicação oral a convite.Introduction: Bakery products are a wide group of ready-to-eat processed foods, highly consumed, especially by young people. These foods mainly present poor nutritional quality, namely due to its high content in saturated fat, salt and sugar. In the past years, food industry has made efforts to develop food products that at the same time meet the consumers demand and contribute to a healthier diet. However, the information concerning their nutritional quality is usually scarce and incomplete. Aim: To evaluate nutritional safety of thirty commercial bakery products available in the Portuguese market, considering its total fat content, salt content and fatty acids profile (including trans fatty acids). Moreover, commercial and supermarket brands for each product were included in the study in order to assess a possible effect of price on the nutritional quality of foods. Materials and methods: Thirty samples of the most common industrial bakery products sold in Portugal were analyzed for their total fat, salt and fatty acids composition. In order to assure the representativeness of samples, bakery products were collected randomly, in the major supermarkets chains from the Portuguese market. Total fat determination was performed by acid hydrolysis method followed by Soxhlet’s extraction with petroleum ether. The salt content was determined by Charpentier Volhard’s titration. Preparation of fatty acids methyl esters was carried out by a combined method of methylation and transesterification, followed by gas chromatography analysis coupled with a mass detector. Results of the present study are expressed as g/100 g of edible portion. Results and discussion: Our results showed that bakery products have high total fat contents, varying between 10.2 ± 0.0 and 27.7 ± 1.0 g/100 g of edible portion. With respect to salt content, the values ranged from 0.244 ± 0.0 to 2.07 ± 0.1 g/100 g. In our study, the most abundant saturated fatty acids found in the analysed samples was palmitic acid (C16:0), which is also one of the most common fatty acids in foodstuffs. Considerable differences in total fat and salt contents were found between commercial and supermarket brands. Conclusions: In summary, this study demonstrated that bakery products commercialized in Portugal are considerable sources of fat and salt. Nevertheless, more studies are needed to cover a wider range of bakery products and other processed foods.This work was funded by National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge, I.P., under the project PTranSALT - Avaliação de ácidos gordos trans, gordura saturada e sal em alimentos processados: estudo do panorama português (2012DAN828). Tânia Gonçalves Albuquerque is grateful for research grant (BRJ/DAN-2012) funded by National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge, I.P