ABSTRACT:
Plant herbs are widely used in cooking as functional food. Hypertensive patients, who remove salt (NaCl) from their diets, report that the food "loses" flavor. Seeking alternatives to replace salt and improve the palatability of food preparations of hypertensive patients the aim of this study was to develop spices based on medicinal plants and analyze their contents of phenolic compounds, flavonoids and antioxidant activity. Plants (cilantro, parsley, oregano, rosemary, basil, garlic, onion) grown organically in the city of Viçosa (state of Mato Grosso, Brazil) were processed and the seasonings were developed from the combination of these species, according to the affective sensory acceptability test using the hedonic scale. Three spices were defined, and methanol extracts were made from them by maceration until exhaustion. In the dosages, we used DPPH to evaluate the antioxidant activity, Folin-Ciocalteu reagent for phenolic compounds and hydrochloric vanillin for flavonoids. The analyses were performed with four replicates and the results were subjected to analysis of variance and to a 5% significance test. In the subjective acceptance of the spices, the average score was 7.07 ± 1.09 and 8.0 ± 0.93 in the affective action as food. The highest content of phenolic compounds was for treatment 2 (garlic, parsley and basil) (55.04 ± 4.307 mg/mL) and the highest antioxidant activity was measured in treatment 1 (garlic, onion, cilantro and oregano) at 0 (48.72%) and 30 minutes (78.37%). The contents of flavonoids were similar in the three treatments. All spices were well accepted by the hypertensive patients and have shown to be a promising replacement of conventional spices.
medicinal plants; spices; hypertension; sensory analysis; functional food
