In Vitro Digestion of Lipid-Based Gels

Consumer awareness of the deleterious environmental issues related to animal-based product production has led to an increase interest in new food products that can mimic the original animal-based product functionality. This trend led to the design of new fat mimetic systems that will be combined with plant-based or cultivated protein matrix. Such alternatives are commonly produced using lipid-based gels such as oleogels, emulsion gels, or bigels. Such systems provide structural integrity similar to original animal-fat due to various structuring approaches while maintaining desirable nutritional profile and mouth feel sensation. Understanding the way these systems hydrolyze and break down under gastrointestinal conditions is a crucial step in order to utilize these systems in real food systems and to further develop and improve them in the future. This chapter provides a broad overview of the digestion process of lipidic system, the parameters affecting it, the common techniques used today for its analysis, and comprehensive summary of previous studies examining these properties for lipid gels.