Donno Dario, Turrini Federica
Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie, Forestali e Alimentari, Università degli Studi di Torino, 10095 Grugliasco (TO), Italy.
Dipartimento di Farmacia, Università degli Studi di Genova, 16132 Genova, Italy.
Foods. 2020 Oct 15;9(10):1474. doi: 10.3390/foods9101474.
Changes in lifestyle and demographics, rising consumer incomes, and shifting preferences due to advanced knowledge about the relationships between food and health contribute to generate new needs in the food supply. Today, the role of food is not only intended as hunger satisfaction and nutrient supply but also as an opportunity to prevent nutrition-related diseases and improve physical and mental well-being. For this reason, there is a growing interest in the novel or less well-known plant foods that offer an opportunity for health maintenance. Recently, interest in plant foods and underutilized fruits is continuously growing, and agrobiodiversity exploitation offers effective and extraordinary potentialities. Plant foods could be an important source of health-promoting compounds and functional food ingredients with beneficial properties: the description of the quality and physicochemical traits, the identification and quantification of bioactive compounds, and the evaluation of their biological activities are important to assess plant food efficacy as functional foods or source of food supplement ingredients.
生活方式和人口结构的变化、消费者收入的增加以及由于对食物与健康关系的深入了解而导致的偏好转变，促使食品供应产生了新的需求。如今，食物的作用不仅在于满足饥饿和提供营养，还在于预防营养相关疾病以及改善身心健康。因此，人们对有助于维持健康的新型或不太知名的植物性食物越来越感兴趣。最近，对植物性食物和未充分利用的水果的兴趣持续增长，农业生物多样性的开发具有有效且非凡的潜力。植物性食物可能是具有有益特性的健康促进化合物和功能性食品成分的重要来源：描述其质量和理化特性、鉴定和定量生物活性化合物以及评估其生物活性，对于评估植物性食物作为功能性食品或食品补充剂成分来源的功效至关重要。
