Since snacks are becoming a major part of people's diets, we thought we should be devoting energy toward making them more nutritious. But you don't have to. Our main goal is to create a snack product that will be available on the market, tastes good and acts as a functional food. The next step, according to Klopfenstein, is to see if the same thing happens in humans. We expected these new snacks to be low-fat, but we didn't expect them to lower cholesterol, too.
Extrusion is simply a modern, more efficient way of mixing and cooking foods.
Depending on the product the K-State researchers are making, fiber from soybeans, corn, wheat or oats is mixed with wheat or rice flour, then fed through the extruder. Extrusion is a fast process, taking 2 to 3 minutes from raw materials to finished product. Of special interest to farmers is that the new extruded snacks are made from the residual fiber of corn, soybeans, wheat and oats. In the past, residual fiber was used almost exclusively for animal feed. The new extruded snacks provide an additional use of grain fiber.