Foods最新文献

Background: Alterations of epithelial barrier integrity and immune response play a key role in the pathogenesis of allergic diseases and represent promising targets for nutritional interventions. Selected postbiotics and plant-derived compounds have been proposed as potential modulators of epithelial barrier and immune function.

Methods: We investigated the effects of a novel food supplement combining heat-inactivated Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GG, butyrate, Quercetin, and Perilla frutescens extracts on epithelial barrier function and innate immunity in an experimental model of the human epithelial gut barrier.

Results: Exposure to the food supplement resulted in epithelial barrier integrity enhancement, consisting of increased transepithelial electrical resistance, tight-junction protein expression, mucus production, and enterocyte differentiation. Moreover, the formulation markedly stimulated the expression of the innate immunity peptides β-defensin-2 and cathelecidin LL-37.

Conclusions: The novel food supplement induces a beneficial modulation of the epithelial gut barrier and immune response. These findings support its potential use as a functional food strategy to restore mucosal homeostasis and to promote immune tolerance in allergic diseases.

This study evaluated the potential of electronic nose (E-nose) technology to discriminate Spanish-style green table olives spoiled by different bacterial strains. Microbial growth, physicochemical properties, sensory attributes, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) profiles were analyzed to assess spoilage patterns. The results indicated strain-dependent microbial survival during incubation, with Bacillus cereus and Enterobacter cloacae showing the highest tolerance. Inoculated olives exhibited significant changes in color, texture, pH, phenolic content, and antioxidant activity compared to the Control. Sensory evaluation revealed a reduction in positive attributes and the emergence of defects such as cooked, rancid, and woody aromas, particularly in olives inoculated with B. cereus and Escherichia coli. VOC analysis confirmed these alterations, showing strain-specific increases in aldehydes, phenols, and esters, along with reductions in alcohols and acids. Principal component analysis (PCA) of E-nose data successfully distinguished two groups-spoiled and non-spoiled samples-explaining 84.8% of variance, while Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) achieved a classification accuracy of 90.4%. These findings highlight the E-nose as a rapid, non-destructive, and reliable tool for detecting bacterial spoilage in table olives, with potential applications in quality control and early spoilage detection.

Mulberry, a plant highly valued for medicinal-edible features, was fermented with Lactobacillus plantarum M3 to enhance its bioactive profile. This study conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the antioxidant activity of fermented mulberry juice (FMJ) and identified key metabolites through an integrated approach involving non-targeted metabolomics, network pharmacology, RT-qPCR, and molecular docking. Under optimized conditions (28 °C, pH 5.5, 12°Bx initial sugar content, 48 h and 5% inoculum), fermentation significantly bolstered the antioxidant capacity of MJ. Specifically, superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity increased from 62.41 ± 0.11 to 84.99 ± 0.07 U/mL, while total phenolic content (TPC) surged from 1108.98 ± 2.90 to 2494.17 ± 7.05 mg GAE/L; DPPH radical scavenging activities were improved by 63.09%. Non-targeted metabolomics identified 195 secondary metabolites, primarily comprising alkaloids, flavonoids, and phenolic acids. Among these, protocatechuic acid, Albanin A, and apigenin exhibited significant dynamic shifts, indicating that they may play a pivotal role in regulating antioxidant capacity. Integrated network pharmacology, RT-qPCR validation, and molecular docking further elucidated that Albanin A and Moracin Q likely drive these enhanced antioxidant effects by activating the Nrf2 pathway, suppressing the NF-κB pathway, and upregulating SOD1 expression. These findings provide a theoretical basis for the development of high-potency functional mulberry products.

Food safety, quality, and traceability have become increasingly important in the agrifood industry in recent years, necessitating the use of reliable and rigorous analytical tools to ensure agrifood surveillance. This work focuses on the development and application of a new molecular approach to verify the authenticity of a specific variety of Triticum turgidum ssp. turanicum, commonly known as Khorasan wheat, which is commercially sold under the KAMUT^® trademark. A method based on duplex digital PCR was developed to identify and quantify T. turanicum variety QK-77 used in KAMUT^® brand products. The assay was validated on pure QK-77 variety alone and mixed with other varieties and on other cereal species. The developed PCR-based assay, tested using two digital PCR platforms (cdPCR and pdPCR), has high sensitivity and accuracy and can be applied to quantify the QK-77 variety in commercial grain lots and processed foods.

Reliable visual characterization of food composition is a fundamental prerequisite for image-based dietary assessment and health-oriented food analysis. In fine-grained food recognition, models often suffer from large intra-class variation and small inter-class differences, where visually similar dishes exhibit subtle yet discriminative differences in ingredient compositions, spatial distribution, and structural organization, which are closely associated with different nutritional characteristics and health relevance. Capturing such composition-related visual structures in a non-invasive manner remains challenging. In this work, we propose a fine-grained food classification framework that enhances spatial relation modeling and key-region awareness to improve discriminative feature representation. The proposed approach strengthens sensitivity to composition-related visual cues while effectively suppressing background interference. A lightweight multi-branch fusion strategy is further introduced for the stable integration of heterogeneous features. Moreover, to support reliable classification under large intra-class variation, a token-aware subcenter-based classification head is designed. The proposed framework is evaluated on the public FoodX-251 and UEC Food-256 datasets, achieving accuracies of 82.28% and 82.64%, respectively. Beyond benchmark performance, the framework is designed to support practical image-based dietary analysis under real-world dining conditions, where variations in appearance, viewpoint, and background are common. By enabling stable recognition of the same food category across diverse acquisition conditions and accurate discrimination among visually similar dishes with different ingredient compositions, the proposed approach provides reliable food characterization for dietary interpretation, thereby supporting practical dietary monitoring and health-oriented food analysis applications.

Frozen red meat products face dual challenges: structural damage from ice recrystallization and subsequent oxidative deterioration driven by endogenous pro-oxidants in heme-rich matrices. This study investigated the efficacy of pigskin collagen-derived antifreeze peptides (APPs) as clean-label cryoprotectants in pork sausages. In vitro characterization confirmed distinct thermal hysteresis (0.51 °C) and potent ice recrystallization inhibition. In the sausage system, 6% APPs overcame ionic screening effects, reducing thawing loss to 4.87% (vs. 7.51% in control) and cooking loss to 14.59%, significantly outperforming commercial phosphates in moisture retention. Low-field NMR revealed that APPs stabilized the actomyosin hydration shell, maintaining the immobilized water proportion (P₂₁) at 93.67% (vs. 88.50% in control) and inhibiting conversion of immobilized water into free water. Furthermore, APPs suppressed oxidative deterioration, limiting protein carbonyl content to 3.08 nmol/mg (vs. 3.71 nmol/mg in control), supporting a "physical-chemical cascade" mechanism whereby superior microstructural preservation mitigates downstream oxidative deterioration. Despite a trade-off in textural resilience (0.37 vs. 0.44), APPs function as specialized "Ice-Structure Stabilizers" offering a robust clean-label strategy for preserving heme-rich meat products.

This study investigated shelf-life prediction of a cold-stored mixed mango-passion fruit smoothie (60:40) using kinetic modeling to compare the effects of dimethyl dicarbonate (DMDC, 250 ppm), pasteurization (90 °C for 100 s), and packaging type (glass vs. polyethylene terephthalate (PET)) during six weeks at 4 °C. Physicochemical parameters, functional properties (total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, and antioxidant activity by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and Ferric Reducing Antioxidant Power assay (FRAP), and microbial stability were monitored weekly. Zero- and first-order kinetic models were applied to describe quality changes, with the first-order model showing superior fit (average R² = 0.936). pH remained relatively stable (p > 0.05), while total soluble solids (TSS) gradually declined in all treatments from approximately 16-17 °Brix to 13-14 °Brix by week 6. PET packaging resulted in a significantly higher total color difference (ΔE) than glass by the end of storage (p ≤ 0.05), particularly in DMDC-treated samples. Pasteurization reduced initial polyphenol oxidase (PPO) activity by 44-56% compared with untreated and DMDC-treated samples (p ≤ 0.05), whereas PET generally exhibited higher residual PPO activity than glass. DMDC treatment better preserved antioxidant capacity, phenolics, and flavonoids, with significantly higher DPPH and FRAP values than controls at week 6 (p ≤ 0.05). Microbiologically, DMDC effectively suppressed total viable counts (<5 log CFU/mL) and yeast and mold (<3 log CFU/mL), outperforming pasteurization. Shelf-life was estimated at 27-29 days for pasteurization and 41-42 days for DMDC (250 ppm), particularly when combined with glass packaging. Overall, the DMDC-glass combination demonstrated strong potential as a non-thermal preservation approach for fruit beverages.

Kucha, a unique tea germplasm rich in theacrine, imparts its fresh leaves with a particularly bitter taste and multiple bioactivities. However, systematic studies on processed Kucha-especially white tea-remain limited. In this study, white teas were produced from two Yunnan Kucha accessions (YLKC1, YLKC2) and two conventional cultivars. Their quality characteristics and non-volatile metabolic profiles were systematically compared using sensory evaluation, targeted quantification and widely targeted metabolomics. Results indicated that Kucha white teas displayed pronounced bitterness, with YLKC1 presenting a richer, well-layered flavor, indicating promising quality potential. Targeted quantification demonstrated a remarkably high theacrine content (~30 mg/g) in Kucha white teas, whereas caffeine and several catechin monomers were significantly lower than those in conventional cultivars. Widely targeted metabolomic analysis identified 3376 non-volatile metabolites. PCA and OPLS-DA demonstrated a clear separation in metabolic profiles between Kucha and control groups. In total, 601 significantly differential metabolites were identified. Taste-driven annotation against ChemTastesDB revealed 17 known bitter compounds, 10 of which were significantly accumulated in Kucha white tea-including theacrine, theophylline, theobromine, L-arginine, neohesperidin, pinocembrin, kaempferol-3-O-(6"-malonyl)glucoside, fraxin, adenosine, and xanthine. Among these compounds, theacrine showed the highest upregulation (9.30-fold). In addition, several galloylated flavonoid glycosides also exhibited significant accumulation. KEGG enrichment analysis further indicated that flavonoid biosynthesis and caffeine metabolism were crucial pathways contributing to these metabolic differences. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that the characteristic bitterness of Kucha white tea arises from the coordinated accumulation of a specific set of bitter phytochemicals rather than a single compound and provide a prioritized panel of candidate compounds for flavor-oriented breeding and processing.

In this manuscript, we report the successful purification of two polysaccharide fractions (F1 and F2) from Cinnamomum cassia (C. cassia). Their chemical composition analysis revealed carbohydrates (54.8-61.1%), sulfates (8.1-9.5%), proteins (4.8-8.0%), and uronic acids (3.7-3.9%), with molecular weights ranging from 46.1 to 2919.1 kDa. Methylation analysis indicated that the highly active F2 fraction possesses a main chain of (1 → 4)-linked glucose, with minor side chains of (1 → 3)- and (1 → 5)-linked arabinose or (1 → 6)-linked glucose, and terminal glucose/arabinose residues. In vitro experiments demonstrated that F2 significantly enhanced nitric oxide and cytokine (TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10) production in RAW264.7 macrophages through activation of NF-κB and MAPK signaling pathways, exhibiting stronger immunomodulatory activity than F1. These results provide evidence that C. cassia polysaccharides, particularly F2, possess promising potential as natural immunostimulants for functional food or therapeutic applications.

Cheese whey, a low-value by-product of cheese production, has gained renewed attention within the transition toward sustainable and circular food systems. Despite posing environmental challenges due to its high biochemical and chemical oxygen demand, whey retains a substantial proportion of milk nutrients, notably high-quality proteins that can be converted into bioactive peptides with potential health benefits. These peptides have been shown to modulate key biological pathways, including angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibition, nitric oxide bioavailability, oxidative stress balance, and inflammatory signaling, providing mechanistic plausibility for cardioprotective and immunomodulatory effects. However, the translation of promising in vitro and animal findings into consistent human health outcomes remains constrained by variability in peptide composition, processing conditions, bioavailability, and study design. This narrative review critically synthesizes current evidence on the functional properties of whey-derived peptides, with particular emphasis on cardiovascular and immunomodulatory outcomes across experimental models. In addition, the review situates whey upcycling within the Portuguese agro-food context, highlighting regional cheese production as both an environmental challenge and an opportunity for sustainable innovation. By integrating mechanistic evidence with sustainability-driven valorization strategies, this review aims to clarify the translational potential of whey-derived peptides as functional food ingredients.