Production of Functional Milk-Based Beverages

Abstract

The interest of consumers in preserving health and increasing life quality through an appropriate diet has grown steadily since the turn of the century. A considerable corpus of research has focused on new functional foods. Among them, fermented milk-based beverages were the first developed and most marketable. Milk based fermented beverages are valuable and versatile due to their safety, shelf-stability, nutritional value and sensory properties, and they certainly offer a delivery system for a diversity of functional principles. New generation products have been successfully developed through intervention in the traditional fermentation or manufacture processes to include live microorganisms, such as probiotics, and bioactive compounds such as prebiotics, lipids, peptides, or antioxidants. This chapter reports the current knowledge on the technological approaches applied to obtain functional milk based beverages, with special emphasis in the more recent technologies and focus on the quality and functional properties of the products. Results obtained by our research group are included.