3.3. Physicochemical stability
The physicochemical parameters are presented in Tables 2 and 3. No
significant difference (p N 0.05) was observed in most cases indicating
that gammaradiation did not cause undesirable changes to the physicochemical
characteristics of lamb loin.
The objective colors (L*, a* and b*) were not different (p N 0.05)
among treatments, indicating that the irradiation did not cause pigment
oxidation (Table 2) although b* (yellow) showed an increase over time
(p b 0.05), up to 28 days, for all samples (Fig. 2).
These results are similar to those obtained by Yang et al. (2011), in
which samples of beef hamburgers un-irradiated or irradiated with
2.5 kGy prior to storage at 4 °C for 7 dayswere evaluated. For the irradiated
samples, they reported no significant difference in L*, while a* and
b* showed an initial decrease on day zero, and then remained constant.
These authors did not detect significant changes in b* during storage,
differing from the present study, but reported significant increases in