Instrumental and sensory assessment for the classification of solid food texture for the elderly diets

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Chewing and swallowing disorders such as dysphagia are common in the elderly people whose number is reported to continuously increase throughout the world. With this trend, the aging populations have recently become the global focus of substantial research interest in a variety of industrial fields and the food industry is also no exception. Further studies are also necessary to establish the guidelines or criteria for controlling the food texture for the elderly with different living and cultural backgrounds. An experimental attempt was made to bridge the gap between instrumental and sensory texture in a model solid food system, providing a reference texture range for the elderly diets. For doing so, uniaxial compression was applied to measure the instrumental hardness of corn starch gels that was correlated with their sensory properties perceived by the elderly aged 60 and older. A polynomial trend line was satisfactorily obtained with the formula (y=0.2188x2-5.7917x+38.14) describing the relationship between instrumental hardness and starch concentration. When the instrumental hardness (stress) was correlated with the sensory hardness, a linear correlation was observed with a coefficient of determination (R2=0.879). However, the use of logarithmic transformation exhibited the improved correlation of coefficients. A fairly linear correlation (R2>0.96) was thus observed between the instrumental and sensory hardness by a semi-logarithmic relationship known as Weber-Fechner’s law scale. In principal component analysis, two principal components that accounted for 86.71% of the total variance, separated the gel samples in terms of hardness/springiness and moistness, respectively. The categories of the starch gel samples were subdivided into five groups with different stress ranges. As a result, five categories of food texture could be successfully provided with corresponding stress range and consumer languages that can be used as a reference tool to establish the guideline or criteria for developing the elderly foods.