# Substituting Sugar in Pastry and Bakeery Products with Functional Ingredients
###### Abstract  
Replacing the amount of sugar in pastries with functional ingredients may be a strategy of interest to food manufacturers. Reducing the content of sugar in pastries and bakeery products could be a measure to reduce diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, tooth decay, and cognitive impairment. Additionally, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming potential are the main issues in sugar beet agricultural production systems. Due to the multiple roles that sugar has in the dough (i.e., provide energy, sweeten, improve the structural characteristics, extend shelf life, limit the swelling of the starch, give color and flavor to ripe products, and ensure the preservation of products), there have been attempts at substituting sugar in percentages of up to 100% in different products such as cakes, muffins, pies, biscuits, cookies, and bread. From the points of view of technology and consumer perception, the best substitutes are apple puree, inulin, oligofructose, stevia, apple pomace, polyedxtrose, dried apples, _Nyna fruitucans_ sap, grape juice/syrup, and date powder/syrup. Depending on the substituent, when substituting sugar in percentages from 10 to 100%, improvements were obtained in terms of texture, rheological properties, sensory properties, consumer acceptability, and physicochemical and nutritional properties.  
sugar; substitution; pastries; functional ingredients +
Footnote †: journal: Medical  
(sweetness, color, flavor, structural, texture, and fermentation) [9; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22]. According to [23], desserts are considered the second most important source of added sugars [23].  
The consumption of pastries has gradually increased in recent years, and they are obtained at the industrial level and available at reduced prices. Every year, approximately 4.5 thousand tons of cakes are produced worldwide. What is being studied is their high sugar content [11; 24]. The high sugar content of pastries and their number of calories is the main problem of these products, although they are highly valued by consumers [12; 25; 26]. Given the multifaceted role of sugar in food, substituting sugar in confectionery is a challenge for producers and researchers in the food industry because they need to redesign traditional products in a healthier way without affecting their sensory and structural properties/characteristics. This is both a technical and a sensory challenge, as it is difficult to reformulate products without affecting the sensory properties, and acceptability can also be compromised.  
Furthermore, the substitution of some percentage of the quantity of sucrose in desserts is both expensive and time consuming. This reformulation involves two strategies: reducing the amount of sugar or replacing all or part of the sugar [11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 27; 28; 29; 30]. In 2015, the WHO recommendation was to reduce the amount of sugar consumed (less than 10% of total energy consumption) by introducing a sugar tax [6; 13; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32; 33; 34; 35; 36; 37; 38; 39; 40; 41; 42].  
Replacing sugar in food is a measure taken as a result of WHO reports and as a result of the demand of consumers who take special interest in nutrition and are aware of the effects of sugar on their health (diabetes, obesity, cancer, etc.) [3; 43; 44; 11; 12; 16; 17; 16; 17; 27; 45; 46].  
Another worldwide problem is represented by energy consumption in modern agricultural systems (49,517.2 MJ/ha of sugar beet). In addition, greenhouse gas emissions and the total global warming potential (9847.77 kg CO\({}_{2}\) eq/ha of sugar beet) have become critical problems in agricultural systems in recent years [47].