Development and Characterization of Oats and Banana Powder Muffins against Hypertension

In the current era, hypertension commonly known as high blood pressure has become one of the leading health challenges. Hypertension can increase the risk of life threatening conditions, heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, obesity and diabetes. Managing blood pressure through healthy diet choices is an important way to reduce these risks. Current study was designed to developed muffins using oat flour and banana powder. Muffins were prepared using different combinations of the ingredients and were assessed for their proximate composition, antioxidant activity and sensory evaluations over a 30 day storage period. The proximate composition results showed non-significant variation across treatments for moisture content from 5.11 ± 0.16% to 5.18 ± 0.03%, protein 6.14 ± 0.03% to 6.17 ± 0.02%, fat content 4.13 ± 0.04% to 4.19 ± 0.03%, ash content ranged from 2.13 ± 0.08% to 2.18 ± 0.02% and crude fiber 10.17 ± 0.02% to 12.99 ± 0.01%. Antioxidant activity was determined using the DPPH method with significant level of p<0.05. The overall mean DPPH values were 29.77 ± 0.06 for T₀, 30.37 ± 0.06 for T₁, 31.95 ± 0.07 for T₂ and 32.69 ± 0.08 for T₃. The overall mean TPC across treatments was 32.62 ± 0.02 for T₀, 32.90 ± 0.03 for T₁, 33.25 ± 0.03 for T₂ and 33.99 0.04 for T₃. Among the treatments, T3 showed the best overall results across nutritional, functional and sensory evaluations.