Kidney beans (KBs), as a traditional edible legume, are an important food crop of high nutritional and economic value worldwide. KBs contain a full range of amino acids and a high proportion of essential amino acids, and are rich in carbohydrates as well as vitamins and minerals. However, KBs contain a variety of non-nutritional factors that impede the digestion and absorption of nutrients, disrupt normal metabolism and produce allergic reactions, which severely limit the exploitation of KBs and related products. Suppressing or removing the activity of non-nutritional factors through different processing methods can effectively improve the application value of KBs and expand the market prospect of their products. The aim of this review was to systematically summarize the main types of non-nutritional factors in KBs and their mechanisms of action, and to elucidate the effects of different food processing techniques on non-nutritional factors. The databases utilized for the research included Web of Science, PubMed, ScienceDirect and Scopus. We considered all original indexed studies written in English and published between 2012 and 2023. We also look forward to the future research direction of producing KB products with low non-nutritional factors, which will provide theoretical basis and foundation for the development of safer and healthier KB products.

Methyl linoleate and α-linolenate were used as representative n-6 and n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid esters, respectively, to examine the effect of oil droplet size on autoxidative stability in oil-in-water systems. The emulsions, which were prepared via membrane emulsification and had a mean oil droplet size of approximately 1-30 μm, and had a stable size during the autoxidation of each substrate at 55°C. The autoxidation of methyl linoleate did not depend on oil droplet size during the entire process and that of methyl α-linolenate was independent of oil droplet size during the first half of the autoxidation process. However, the autoxidation rate of methyl α-linolenate proceeded faster in the emulsion with smaller oil droplet size during the last half of the autoxidation process.

The solvent replacement drying method greatly enhanced the oxidative stability of microcapsules, which was attributed to the weaker external force on the wall layer and the increased proportion of an α-helical protein structure during the drying process.