Antioxidants to improve quality of poultry meat products: when and how??

The growing consumers demand for high-quality and safe food products has pushed the poultry sector towards leaner products and/or with a higher level of unsaturated fatty acids, especially n-3 as they have proven to help preventing cardiovascular and inflammatory diseases. However, such poultry meat products are more subjected to oxidative degradations and thus antioxidant inclusion/addition has become necessary to further warrant their stability, overall quality, and shelf-life. Following market demand for natural products, plant derived antioxidants are more preferred and they can be successfully and simply introduced into meat by dietary supplementation. In a sustainable view of the food chain, more and more extracts from agri-food by-products (such as grape seed, olive waste waters, citrus peels) are being used as natural antioxidant sources. Dietary supplementation is largely employed for antioxidant introduction into tissues as it warrants a more efficient and wide distribution, without reaching hazardous levels for human consumption. Nevertheless, when dealing with highly processed poultry meat products, dietary supplementation is often insufficient to contrast oxidation and therefore antioxidants should be further added as extracts or emulsions. The latter have proven to be an excellent system to modulate the delivery of bioactive compounds, with different chemical properties. To achieve a successful meat product formulation, it is also important to know whether antioxidants will mainly predispose within the bulk phases or at the interface, so as to seek combined and/or synergic effects between them to better control the oxidative process within the product during processing and storage, with the ultimate goal to get a high-quality product from the nutritional and safety standpoints.