Wheat yields a cloudy, thick mixture, while cornstarch produces more clear mixtures such as gravies or sources.
Food such as bread potatoes and rice are valuable sources of dietary starch and provide significant proportion of the carbohydrate requirement of a well balance diet.
Plant cells store glucose as starches – long, branched or unbranched chains of hundreds or thousands of glucose molecules linked together.
These giant starch molecules are packed side by side in groups such as wheat or rice, in root crops and tubers such as yams and potatoes, and in legumes such as peas and beans.
Some foods have been modified to increase their starch content. For instant, ‘high starch’ potatoes have been produced by modifying an enzyme in the growing potato tuber that is involved in making starch.
Starch in the diet is also important because the foods in which it occurs tend to be high in dietary fiber. The presence of this dietary fiber slows down the rate at which glucose from starch is absorbed into the blood stream.
In most human societies peopled depend on as staple grain for much of their food energy: rice in Asia, wheat in Canada, the United States and Europe corn in much of Central and South America: millet, rye, barley and oats elsewhere.
Sources of starch
