Nutritional constituents of pseudo cereals and their potential use in food systems: A review.

Consumers are more focused to adopt healthy life styles and appropriate nutritional habits. From the variety of plants which can be potentially used for human nutrition, today fewer and fewer species are used due to elevated risk of health related problems. Results from a number of recent studies have highlighted the need for an improvement in the nutritional quality of cereal based gluten free products. In order to meet the demands of the growing population new food stuffs are being continuously investigated with the aim to improve the diet and conduce to a better health state. At present attention of researchers is more focused towards the exploitation of alternative crops or underutilized species for multifarious uses. Interest in the pseudo cereals has aroused considerably due to their excellent nutritional, phenolic and phytochemical profile and their use in development of gluten free products. Moreover, the amino acid profile and nutritional properties like essential amino acid index, biological value, protein efficiency ratio and nutritional index of pseudo cereals are higher as compared to conventional cereals like wheat rice and maize. Recent studies have indicated that phenolics present in pseudo cereals have several health benefits like prevention and reduction of oxidative stress, anti-cancer, anti-diabetic, anti-inflammatory, anti-hypertensive and prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, commercialization of these pseudo cereals would help to combat various health related issues, and also the availability of palatable pseudo cereal containing gluten-free products would represent advance towards ensuring an adequate intake of nutrients in subjects with celiac disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]