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It is vital to understand how chewing affects ease of eating and enjoyment in order to properly formulate foods that cater to over 65s, especially in term of valuable protein content.

With that vision, we chose two classic widely-retailed cereal products known to offer a soft-textured crumb - brioche and sponge cake- and versions fortified with pea protein.

For each of these four foods, i.e. the standard brioche and sponge cake and the pea protein-fortified versions, the mechanisms leading to deformation and fragmentation into a bolus were tracked using X-ray microtomography (MCT), ESRF Grenoble), modelled using the Finite Element Method (FEM), and studied on 20 volunteers aged 65 years or over presenting contrasting combinations of oral and salivary health.

Analysis of the 3D MCT images showed that the crumb pore walls were thicker in the brioches than the sponge cakes, and fortification with pea proteins led to even thicker pore walls.

Dynamic analysis of pore cell structure during compression showed that the sponge cake pore walls are easier to fracture whereas the brioche pore walls readily undergo deformation with little compression force and no fracture.

In addition, size of the food bolus particles in sponge cakes eaten by all 20 subjects decreased rapidly during chewing, which points to a fragmentation mechanism, whereas chewed brioche particles showed a combination of fragmentation and agglomeration mechanisms.

Differences in breakdown patterns led to different behaviors chewing behaviors evidenced by the variations in bolus viscosity.  Once we take physiological inter-individual differences into account,  these different breakdown patterns may be assigned to the difference in pore cell structure between these cereal-product foods.