NMR and the water-holding issue of pork

Consumers' awareness of food quality has never been more pronounced. Meat forms a substantial part of the food consumption, and accordingly techniques to control the quality of meat are needed. In addition, a better understanding of how basic biochemical and biophysical factors influence the final meat quality is also required for optimization of the quality. Water-holding capacity (WHC) is a major quality attribute of fresh meat. However, the exact mechanisms determining the WHC of meat are not fully understood. Especially, characteristics about proposed water populations in the meat and how they are interrelated with drip loss need to be studied further. Moreover, the distribution and mobility of water in muscle during its conversion to meat and how they are affected by intrinsic and extrinsic factors are poorly elucidated. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has during recent years gained increasing use within different areas of muscle physiology and meat science. NMR H-1 relaxation methodologies enable detection of the mobility of protons in heterogeneous materials and thereby provide possibilities for a characterization of the properties of water. The objective of this presentation is to give an overview of the use of NMR relaxation measurements to characterize the proposed water populations in meat and investigate how the distribution and mobility of the water changes postmortem. In addition, applications of NMR spectroscopy in metabolic studies will be considered.