Properties
and consumer appreciation of fat containing food products
are greatly influenced by the growth of the fat crystalline domains
and their morphology. Various analytical methods can be exploited
to provide insight into the multilength scale microstructure of fat
networks, but very few are able to discriminate structural features
between different ways of processing fats. We selected in this work
methods that highlight the mesostructure of fat crystalline systems.
In this respect, 1H spin-diffusion NMR and XRD methods
were employed to determine the fat crystallite thicknesses (crystalline
domain size). This is the first attempt to quantify the mesostructure
domains of triglyceride-based fat crystals by means of 1H spin-diffusion NMR experiments. The crystalline domain sizes determined
by spin-diffusion NMR were found to be in good agreement with the
crystallite thickness determined by the Scherrer analysis of the first
order diffraction line from SAXS data. These results demonstrate the
ability of the NMR technique to characterize the mesostructure of
fats in a quantitative manner. This method is of particular interest
for the structure analysis of fats, especially because of the possibility
to quantify the size of the crystalline domains in diluted systems
where scattering techniques struggle with the amount of diffracting
material.