Advances in Food and Nutrition Research最新文献

Intermediate wheatgrass (IWG, Thinopyrum intermedium) is a perennial grain that offers a novel solution for advancing sustainable agriculture and food production. Unlike annual cereals, IWG is a deep-rooted, long-lived species that provides significant environmental benefits including enhanced soil health, reduced erosion, improved carbon sequestration, and lower input requirements. This chapter explores the potential of IWG as a sustainable and nutritionally valuable ingredient in cereal-based foods. It provides a comprehensive review of IWG's physical, compositional, functional, and nutritional properties, emphasizing key advantages such as higher dietary fiber, protein, and phenolic contents compared to traditional cereals. Special attention is given to starch and protein characteristics, dietary fiber profiles, lipid composition, and micronutrient concentrations, including vitamins and minerals. The effects of various processing technologies-such as extrusion, steam explosion, and germination-on the techno-functional properties of IWG are discussed, highlighting opportunities to enhance its end-use performance. Its application in bakery products is critically evaluated, with a focus on dough rheology, gluten functionality, and breadmaking quality. Despite challenges associated with its weaker gluten network, IWG demonstrates strong potential for use in products such as flatbreads, cookies, pasta, and as a partial substitute for common wheat in high volume breads. By combining ecological resilience with health-promoting nutritional attributes, IWG stands out as a promising ingredient for next-generation cereal products aligned with global sustainability, nutrition, and regenerative agriculture goals.

Extrusion processing stands out as a versatile and efficient technology for producing a wide range of food products, including snacks, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, meat analogues, and pasta. However, most conventional extruded products rely heavily on refined cereals, resulting in formulations that are high in rapidly digestible carbohydrates but low in protein, dietary fiber, and essential micronutrients-raising concerns about their nutritional adequacy and long-term health impacts. In parallel, growing global emphasis on environmental sustainability is driving the food industry to seek new approaches that not only reduce resource consumption and waste but also align production practices with greener, more responsible standards. In response to these challenges, recent innovations in extrusion research have focused on redesigning product formulations and processing techniques to enhance nutritional quality, promote healthier dietary patterns, and improve environmental sustainability. These efforts include incorporating nutrient-dense, upcycled, and underutilized ingredients such as plant protein isolates, oilseed meals, fruit and vegetable pomaces, algae, and insect powders. Meanwhile, technological advancements such as raw material enzymatic treatments, novel extruder die designs and blowing agent-assisted extrusion are being explored to enhance nutritional quality and promote sustainability while preserving desirable sensory attributes. Despite significant progress at the research level, challenges remain in balancing nutrition, sensory appeal, and consumer acceptability, as well as in navigating regulatory frameworks and achieving industrial scalability. This chapter summarizes the ongoing developments and future directions in ingredient and process innovations for cereal-based extruded foods, highlighting the potential of these innovations to address global health concerns and advance sustainability goals.

Hydrogel delivery systems based on polysaccharides and proteins have the ability to protect functional substances from chemical degradation, control/target release, and increase bioavailability. This chapter summarizes the recent progress in the utilization of hydrogel delivery systems for nutritional interventions. Various hydrogel delivery systems as well as their preparation, structure, and properties are given. The applications for the encapsulation, protection, and controlled delivery of functional substances are described. We also discuss their potential and challenges in managing chronic diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, liver disease, and cancer, aiming at providing theoretical references for exploring novel hydrogel delivery systems and their practical prospects in precise nutritional interventions.

Current analytical methods utilized for food safety inspection requires improvement in terms of their cost-efficiency, speed of detection, and ease of use. Sensor array technology has emerged as a food safety assessment method that applies multiple cross-reactive sensors to identify specific targets via pattern recognition. When the sensor arrays are fabricated with nanomaterials, the binding affinity of analytes to the sensors and the response of sensor arrays can be remarkably enhanced, thereby making the detection process more rapid, sensitive, and accurate. Data analysis is vital in converting the signals from sensor arrays into meaningful information regarding the analytes. As the sensor arrays can generate complex, high-dimensional data in response to analytes, they require the use of machine learning algorithms to reduce the dimensionality of the data to gain more reliable outcomes. Moreover, the advances in handheld smart devices have made it easier to read and analyze the sensor array signals, with the advantages of convenience, portability, and efficiency. While facing some challenges, the integration of artificial intelligence with nanosensor arrays holds promise for enhancing food safety monitoring.

Vitamin D has an established role in calcium homeostasis but its deficiency is emerging also as a new risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). In particular, several epidemiological and clinical studies have reported a close association between low vitamin D levels and several cardiovascular risk factors and major CVDs, such as coronary artery disease, heart failure, and cardiac arrhythmias. In all these clinical settings, vitamin D deficiency seems to predispose to increased morbidity, mortality, and recurrent cardiovascular events. Despite this growing evidence, interventional trials with supplementation of vitamin D in patients at risk of or with established CVD are still controversial. In this chapter, we summarize the currently available evidence on the links between vitamin D deficiency and major cardiovascular risk factors and CVD, in terms of both clinical relevance and potential therapeutic implications.

The pronounced perception of off-odors poses a prevalent issue across various categories of food ingredients and processed products, significantly exerting negative effects on the overall quality, processability, and consumer acceptability of both food items and raw materials. Conventional methods such as brining, marinating, and baking, are the main approaches to remove the fishy odor. Although these methods have shown notable efficacy, there are simultaneously inherent drawbacks that ultimately diminish the processability of raw materials, encompassing alterations in the original flavor profiles, the potential generation of harmful substances, restricted application scopes, and the promotion of excessive protein/lipid oxidation. In response to these challenges, recent endeavors have sought to explore innovative deodorization techniques, including emerging physical processing approaches, the development of high-efficiency adsorbent material, biological fermentation methods, and ozone water rinsing. However, the specific mechanisms underpinning the efficacy of these deodorization techniques remain not fully elucidated. This chapter covers the composition of major odor-causing substances in food, the methodologies for their detection, the mechanisms governing their formation, and the ongoing development of deodorization techniques associated with the comparison of their advantages, disadvantages, and application mechanisms. The objective of this chapter is to furnish a theoretical framework for enhancing deodorization efficiency through fostering the development of suitable deodorization technologies in the future.

Flavonoids are a class of polyphenols which are widely distributed in natural products and foods. They have diverse bioactivities, including anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, and antioxidant activities. Generally, the foods rich in flavonoids are usually consumed after thermal processing. However, thermal stability of flavonoids is usually low, and thermal processing could cause either positive or negative influences on their stability and bioactivities. In this review, the effects of thermal processing on thermal stability and bioactivity of dietary flavonoids from different food sources are summarized. Then, strategies to improve thermal stability of dietary flavonoids are discussed and the effect of some promising thermal technologies are also preliminary clarified. The promising thermal technologies may be alternative to conventional thermal processing technologies.

Packaging is fundamental to maintaining the quality of food, but its contribution with a negative footprint to the environment must be completely changed worldwide to reduce pollution and climate change. Innovative and sustainable packaging and new strategies of reutilization are necessary to reduce plastic waste accumulation, maintain food quality and safety, and reduce food losses and waste. The purpose of this chapter is to present innovations in food packaging for a sustainable and circular economy. First, to present the eco-design packaging approach as well as new strategies for recycled or recyclable materials in food packaging. Second, to show current trends in new packaging materials developed from the use of agro-industrial wastes as well as new methods of production, including 3D/4D printing, electrostatic spinning, and the use of nanomaterials.

The role of vitamin D in the prevention of chronic diseases including cancer, has received a great deal of attention during the past few decades. The term "Cancer" represents multiple disease states with varying biological complexities. The strongest link between vitamin D and cancer is provided by ecological and studies like observational, in preclinical models. It is apparent that vitamin D exerts diverse biological responses in a tissue specific manner. Moreover, several human factors could affect bioactivity of vitamin D. The mechanism(s) underlying vitamin D initiated anti-carcinogenic effects are diverse and includes changes at the muti-system levels. The oncogenic environment could easily corrupt the traditional role of vitamin D or could ensure resistance to vitamin D mediated responses. Several researchers have identified gaps in our knowledge pertaining to the role of vitamin D in cancer. Further areas are identified to solidify the role of vitamin D in cancer control strategies.

Numerous nanomaterials endowed with outstanding light harvesting and photothermal conversion abilities have been extensively applied in various fields, such as photothermal diagnosis and therapy, trace substance detection, and optical imaging. Although photothermal detection methods have been established utilizing the photothermal effect of nanomaterials in recent years, there is a scarcity of reviews regarding their application in food safety detection. Herein, the recent advancements in the photothermal conversion mechanism, photothermal conversion efficiency calculation, and preparation method of photothermal nanomaterials were reviewed. In particular, the application of photothermal nanomaterials in various food hazard analyses and the newly established photothermal detection methods were comprehensively discussed. Moreover, the development and promising future trends of photothermal nanomaterial-based detection methods were discussed, which provide a reference for researchers to propose more effective, sensitive, and accurate detection methods.