Incorporating bioactive carotenoids into foods that do not
naturally contain high amounts of these compounds may offer
great health benefits and provide new markets for food products.
Addition of carotenoids to functional foods could be advantageous
since they could be inporporated into an organic
solution (i.e. an edible oil), which makes them more bioavailable
than carotenoids in a plant cellular matrix. However, there
are a number of stability issues that must be overcome before
carotenoids can be successfully used as functional food ingredients
since carotenoids placed in organic solutions, are less
stable than carotenoids naturally occurring in tissues (Britton,
1995; Polyakov and Leshina, 2006). Therefore, it is essential to
understand the mechanisms by which carotenoids may be degraded,
in order to develop strategies for optimizing the stability
of these bioactive ingredients.