ABSTRACT
Recently, the market of functional foods has received a great deal of attention due to the self-care awareness of consumers, aging demographics and steadily increasing health-care costs. A wide variety of functional foods are now available, which contain food bioactive ingredients with well-known nutritional and technological characteristics. This chapter provides basic information about some of the bioactive carbohydrates, i.e., prebiotics, which have a generally recognized as safe (GRAS) statue, as well as some of the novel Iranian hydrocolloids. It then discusses their bifidogenic activity and protecting the role against adverse conditions of the gastrointestinal tract for probiotics. The potential applications of these biologically active components in common dairy foods are also highlighted in this book chapter.
