Investigations of food colloids by NMR and MRI

Since the publication of the ISO method for measurement of solid fat content using NMR relaxation at low field, the application of this technique to the characterisation of food composition and food structure on several length scales has expanded considerably. Improvements in the electronic and computational specifications of NMR spectrometers and the use of more sophisticated signal processing methods have led to several new applications, and NMR, previously recognized as a powerful technique to provide information regarding composition, is now widely used for microstructural investigations. Moreover, MRI applications have in recent years been extended from the medical field to food science and this has opened up new opportunities for the understanding of food. We examine here recent developments in these techniques, including NMR relaxation, multidimensional NMR relaxation, diffusion NMR and MRI.