Oxidative stability of phytosterols in bread baking

As part of a safety evaluation of food enrichment, reactivity of added components, such as phytosterols, should be studied. This experiment was performed to study the formation of sitosterol and campesterol oxidation products in phytosterol-enriched white wheat bread during baking and toasting. When taking into account the quality of phytosterol preparation, i.e. the oxide content of phytosterol preparation added to dough, the accumulation of phytosterol oxides in baked whole bread, bread crusts and toasted bread was very low being 0.0%, 0.3% and 0.1% for sitosterol and 0.0%, 0.4% and 0.1% for campesterol, respectively. This study thus indicates that bread baking and further toasting do not lead to significant phytosterol oxidation reactions