The Potential of Zea Mays Ears and It Extracts as an Alternative Food Nutritive Ingredients

Plants produce various essential nutritional substances including natural antioxidants and phytochemicals. These natural bioactive compounds confer health benefits which include protection against cardiovascular diseases (CVD), cancer, degenerative diseases, stroke, obesity and other illnesses. Young corn or Zea mays ears are commonly used as vegetable. It is rarely utilized as raw food materials due to the lack of knowledge of its nutritional value and possible functional properties. The present study investigates the ability of young corn as alternative nutritive ingredients to be used in food products. Dried young corn contained 30.4 g/100 g total dietary fibre (TDF) while aqueous extract residues (AERs) recorded 40.91-57.17 g/100 g of TDF. Meanwhile, all aqueous extract (AE) samples had very low concentration of TDFs at < 1.0 g/100 g. Dried young corn had 10.70 g/100 g of total sugars with fructose and sucrose being the major sugars presented. Among sugars, sucrose was the major component detected in all young corn AEs followed by fructose. AE-90 min treatment recorded the highest concentration of sucrose (17.08 g/100 g) compared to the other treatments which had14.20 (AE-60 min) and 13.03 g/100 g (AE-30 min), respectively. Contradictory, all AERs treatment recorded low concentration of total sugars (1.35-3.70 g/100 g). The concentration of protein was increased proportionally with the level of young corn powder used in cookies. It is concluded that the aqueous extracts of Zea mays ears contained important diabetic-friendly sugar constituents (fructose and sucrose) while it AERs consisted essential dietary fibre compounds. Thus, young corn could potentially be an alternative source of dietary fibres and sugars components in processed food products.