WATER RELATIONSHIPS IN STARCH TRANSITIONS

A new understanding of water relationships in starch-based ingredients , products, and processes has been approached through 'food polymer sc ience', an innovative research discipline that emphasizes the fundamen tal and generic similarities between synthetic and food polymers, and provides a new interpretive and experimental framework for the study o f food systems that are kinetically constrained. This paper reviews th e key elements of the food polymer science approach, including the con cepts of 'water dynamics' and 'glass dynamics', and how the broad rele vance of this approach to studies of state transitions and structure-f unction relationships that control starch gelatinization, retrogradati on, and annealing has been confirmed in many recent reports.