Neves is grateful to the Program to Disseminate Tenure Track System, University of Tsukuba, Japan, for the financial support. The author C. Prentice acknowledges for the financial support by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the grants provided by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) of Brazil. “
“Current Opinion in Food Science 2015, 1:13–20 This

review comes from a themed issue on Food chemistry and biochemistry Edited by Delia Rodriguez Amaya http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cofs.2014.08.001 2214-7993/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Although it is not possible to precisely determine the exact period when men mastered the use of fire, which might have happened in the Middle Paleolithic (400 000–200 000 years ago), it is unequivocal that its use for cooking was a major turning point in human evolution. Cooking DNA Damage inhibitor roots and grains Capmatinib research buy allowed humans to retrieve more energy from available vegetable food and as a consequence, sufficient energy for hunting, which provided food with higher caloric density. This pattern of feeding was critical for the evolution of the species, once the development of a bigger brain required more available energy. Further, the use of heat allowed the development of food preservation technologies which substantially contributed to the decrease in food-borne

diseases, to the decrease of under-nutrition,

by making food available which, in turn, contributed to the drastic changes in life style and population distribution (rural and urban areas) all around the world in the last century. Different reactions take place during thermal processing of foods, some of them are desirable and relate to the sensory properties that increase their acceptance, while some of them must be avoided as they generate harmful substances to human health, such as acrylamide and nitrosamines. Lipid oxidation, sugar caramelization, enzyme inactivation, protein denaturation are some examples of modifications that heat can provoke in foods. Food reactions that initiate with the condensation of a carbonyl group and an amine group, producing, at the final stage, brown pigments, were first studied and described by the French biochemist Louis-Camille Maillard from 1912 to 1917 and, Dimethyl sulfoxide therefore, are known as Maillard reaction. Maillard was able to predict, working on peptide synthesis by heating free amino acids in glycerol, that the amine-carbonyl compounds reactions could lead to nutrients loss during heat processing, to the abiotic generation of humic substances in soil and to protein modification in vivo and, yet, his work was put aside for almost 35 years. Robert et al. [1] provide an interesting analysis of the scientific scenario at the time of Maillard’s discoveries and why his work was overlooked for so long.