"The dangers of consuming high amounts of saturated fats have been well-documented in the past couple of decades. Surprisingly, even after much negative publicity and consumer concerns, the replacement of saturated fats in manufactured food products has been very slow. Some promising alternative systems have been identified as the future of oil structuring without the presence of saturated fats. However, their potential for food applications are yet to be proven in actual product conditions. Emulsions are the most common colloidal systems that forms basis of many of the edible food products, hence, structuring approaches based on the use of emulsions as the templates can be considered ideal for food application provided we restrict ourselves to the use of food-grade materials. The proposed research is an ambitious project to enhance the fundamental understanding of the complex physico-chemical and colloidal aspects that accompany the process of oil structuring. The specific objectives of the proposed research is to focus on the use of food-grade materials such as proteins and polysaccharides to generate oil continuous and water continuous emulsions and further use these emulsions as templates to change liquid oil into soft, elastic gel-like systems."