**Food Quality**

**Chapter 6**

**Oxidation and Antioxidants in Fish and Meat from**

Both in meat and especially in fish there is a high risk of quality loss due to oxidation [1, 2]. Lip‐ id oxidation in meat and fish-products leads to rancid taste and off flavor and development of many different substances from which some have even adverse effects to human health e.g. [3]. Oxidation limits storage time and thereby also affects marketing and distribution of both fish and meat products. Especially fish, being rich in n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) is sus‐ ceptible to peroxidation of PUFA resulting in restriction of storage and processing possibili‐ ties [4]. Furthermore, peroxidative products, particularly aldehydes, can react with specific amino acids to form carbonyls [5] and protein aggregates [6], causing additional nutritional losses. In red meat and also in red fish like salmon oxidation will not only deteriorate the lip‐

The addition of antioxidants is therefore necessary to increase storage stability, sensory quality and nutritional value of animal products [9, 10]. Due to the positive health effects of long chain n-3 PUFA, there is an increased interest to produce fish and meat products rich in n-3 PUFA [11]. Increasing the amount of easily oxidized PUFA in animal products however will also require a higher content of antioxidants in the end-product to protect the nutrition‐ al valuable fatty acids (FA). The importance of a well-balanced combination of PUFA and antioxidants, both for product stability and human nutrition, was also emphasized by [12]. Beside the traditionally used antioxidants in meat and fish also a wide variation of herbs, spices and fruits are used more and more as additives with antioxidative capacity [13-17]. In the recent years a lot of research has been carried out evaluating these natural substances as antioxidative additives in food products leading to novel combinations of antioxidants and the development of novel food products [17-20]. The high antioxidant capacity of these plant parts is particularly due to their content of different phenols, anthocyanins and ascorbic

> © 2013 Sampels; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

© 2013 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ids, but also the color [7, 8] and thereby affect visual consumer acceptability.

acid, which can act as radical scavengers [21].

**Farm to Fork**

Sabine Sampels

**1. Introduction**

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/53169

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter
