Annual Review of Food Science and Technology

Meats are rich in lipids and proteins, exposing them to rapid oxidative changes. Proteins are essential to the human diet, and changes in the structure and functional attributes can greatly influence the quality and nutritional value of meats. In this article, we review the molecular changes of proteins during processing, their impact on the nutritional value of fresh and processed meat, the digestibility and bioavailability of meat proteins, the risks associated with high meat intake, and the preventive strategies employed to mitigate these risks...

Sensory science is a multidisciplinary field that encompasses a wide variety of established and newly developed tests to document human responses to stimuli. Sensory tests are not limited to the area of food science but they find wide application within the diverse areas of the food science arena. Sensory tests can be divided into two basic groups: analytical tests and affective tests. Analytical tests are generally product-focused, and affective tests are generally consumer-focused. Selection of the appropriate test is critical for actionable results...

Food proteins, polysaccharides, and polyphenols are natural ingredients with different functional attributes. For instance, many proteins are good emulsifiers and gelling agents, many polysaccharides are good thickening and stabilizing agents, and many polyphenols are good antioxidants and antimicrobials. These three kinds of ingredients can be combined into protein, polysaccharide, and/or polyphenol conjugates or complexes using covalent or noncovalent interactions to create novel multifunctional colloidal ingredients with new or improved properties...

Indole-3-carbinol (I3C) is a bioactive phytochemical abundant in cruciferous vegetables. One of its main in vivo metabolites is 3,3'-diindolylmethane (DIM), formed by the condensation of two molecules of I3C. Both I3C and DIM alter multiple signaling pathways and related molecules controlling diverse cellular events, including oxidation, inflammation, proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, angiogenesis, and immunity. There is a growing body of evidence from both in vitro and in vivo models that these compounds possess strong potential to prevent several forms of chronic disease such as inflammation, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, hypertension, neurodegenerative diseases, and osteoporosis...

Mechano-bactericidal (MB) nanopatterns have the ability to inactivate bacterial cells by rupturing cellular envelopes. Such biocide-free, physicomechanical mechanisms may confer lasting biofilm mitigation capability to various materials encountered in food processing, packaging, and food preparation environments. In this review, we first discuss recent progress on elucidating MB mechanisms, unraveling property-activity relationships, and developing cost-effective and scalable nanofabrication technologies. Next, we evaluate the potential challenges that MB surfaces may face in food-related applications and provide our perspective on the critical research needs and opportunities to facilitate their adoption in the food industry...

With the rising problems of food shortages, energy costs, and raw materials, the food industry must reduce its environmental impact. We present an overview of more resource-efficient processes to produce food ingredients, describing their environmental impact and the functional properties obtained. Extensive wet processing yields high purities but also has the highest environmental impact, mainly due to heating for protein precipitation and dehydration. Milder wet alternatives exclude, for example, low pH-driven separation and are based on salt precipitation or water only...

Nondigestible functional oligosaccharides are of particular interest in recent years because of their unique prebiotic activities, technological characteristics, and physiological effects. Among different types of strategies for the production of nondigestible functional oligosaccharides, enzymatic methods are preferred owing to the predictability and controllability of the structure and composition of the reaction products. Nondigestible functional oligosaccharides have been proved to show excellent prebiotic effects as well as other benefits to intestinal health...

It is important to have larger proportions of health-beneficial polyunsaturated lipids in foods, but these nutrients are particularly sensitive to oxidation, and dedicated strategies must be developed to prevent this deleterious reaction. In food oil-in-water emulsions, the oil-water interface is a crucial area when it comes to the initiation of lipid oxidation. Unfortunately, most available natural antioxidants, such as phenolic antioxidants, do not spontaneously position at this specific locus. Achieving such a strategic positioning has therefore been an active research area, and various routes have been proposed: lipophilizing phenolic acids to confer them with an amphiphilic character; functionalizing biopolymer emulsifiers through covalent or noncovalent interactions with phenolics; or loading Pickering particles with natural phenolic compounds to yield interfacial antioxidant reservoirs...

Microbubbles are largely unused in the food industry yet have promising capabilities as environmentally friendly cleaning and supporting agents within products and production lines due to their unique physical behaviors. Their small diameters increase their dispersion throughout liquid materials, promote reactivity because of their high specific surface area, enhance dissolution of gases into the surrounding liquid phase, and promote the generation of reactive chemical species. This article reviews techniques to generate microbubbles, their modes of action to enhance cleaning and disinfection, their contributions to functional and mechanical properties of food materials, and their use in supporting the growth of living organisms in hydroponics or bioreactors...

In contrast to traditional breeding, which relies on the identification of mutants, metabolic engineering provides a new platform to modify the oil composition in oil crops for improved nutrition. By altering endogenous genes involved in the biosynthesis pathways, it is possible to modify edible plant oils to increase the content of desired components or reduce the content of undesirable components. However, introduction of novel nutritional components such as omega-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids needs transgenic expression of novel genes in crops...

Inadequate dietary fiber consumption has become common across industrialized nations, accompanied by changes in gut microbial composition and a dramatic increase in chronic metabolic diseases. The human gut microbiome harbors genes that are required for the digestion of fiber, resulting in the production of end products that mediate gastrointestinal and systemic benefits to the host. Thus, the use of fiber interventions has attracted increasing interest as a strategy to modulate the gut microbiome and improve human health...

With advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the development and implementation of digital food systems are becoming increasingly possible. There is tremendous interest in using different AI applications, such as machine learning models, natural language processing, and computer vision to improve food safety. Possible AI applications are broad and include, but are not limited to, ( a ) food safety risk prediction and monitoring as well as food safety optimization throughout the supply chain, ( b ) improved public health systems (e...

Microgreens are edible young plants that have recently attracted interest because of their color and flavor diversity, phytonutrient abundance, short growth cycle, and minimal space and nutrient requirements. They can be cultivated in a variety of systems from simple home gardens to sophisticated vertical farms with automated irrigation, fertilizer delivery, and lighting controls. Microgreens have also attracted attention from space agencies hoping that their sensory qualities can contribute to the diet of astronauts in microgravity and their cultivation might help maintain crew physical and psychological health on long-duration spaceflight missions...

Starch is one of the most abundant renewable biopolymers in nature and is the main constituent in the human diet and a raw material for the food industry. Native starches are limited in most industrial applications and often tailored by structural modification to enhance desirable attributes, minimize undesirable attributes, or create new attributes. Enzymatic approaches for structuring starch have become of interest to the food industry precisely because the reactions minimize the formation of undesirable by-products and coproducts and are therefore considered environmentally friendly methods for producing clean-label starches with better behavioral characteristics...

The in vitro digestion model developed by the INFOGEST international consortium is widely used to simulate the physicochemical processes occurring inside the human gastrointestinal tract (mouth, stomach, and small intestine) during the digestion of foods. In this review, we provide a brief overview of the INFOGEST method and the procedures used to measure the digestion of macronutrients (lipids, proteins, and starch), the bioaccessibility of bioactive agents (vitamins, minerals, and nutraceuticals), and the changes in the structure and physical properties of foods under gastrointestinal conditions (particle size, charge, and location)...

Bacteriophages (or phages) represent one of the most persistent threats to food fermentations, particularly large-scale commercial dairy fermentations. Phages infecting lactic acid bacteria (LAB) that are used as starter cultures in dairy fermentations are well studied, and in recent years there have been significant advances in defining the driving forces of LAB-phage coevolution. The means by which different starter bacterial species defend themselves against phage predation and the chromosomal or plasmid location of the genes encoding these defense mechanisms have dictated the technological approaches for the development of robust starter cultures...

Edible nanoparticles are being developed for the oral delivery of nutrients to improve human health and well-being. Because of the extremely demanding conditions foods experience within the gastrointestinal tract, fundamental knowledge about the biological fate of encapsulated nutrients must be constantly revised. In this review, we first provide an overview of the fundamental absorption pathways of ingested foods and then discuss the evaluation models available to test and predict the biological fate of nutrient-loaded nanoparticles...

Competence refers to the specialized physiological state in which bacteria undergo transformation through the internalization of exogenous DNA in a controlled and genetically encoded process that leads to genotypic and, in many cases, phenotypic changes. Natural transformation was first described in Streptococcus pneumoniae and has since been demonstrated in numerous species, including Bacillus subtilis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae . Homologs of the genes encoding the DNA uptake machinery for natural transformation have been reported to be present in several lactic acid bacteria, including Lactobacillus spp...

Plants produce a diversity of plant secondary metabolites (PSMs), which function as defense chemicals against herbivores and microorganisms but also as signal compounds. An individual plant produces and accumulates mixtures of PSMs with different structural features using different biosynthetic pathways. Almost all PSMs exert one or several biological activities that can be useful for nutrition and health. This review discusses the modes of action of PSMs alone and in combinations. In a mixture, most individual PSMs can modulate different molecular targets; they are thus multitarget drugs...

Life expectancy has dramatically increased over the past 200 years, but modern life factors such as environmental exposure, antibiotic overuse, C-section deliveries, limited breast-feeding, and diets poor in fibers and microbes could be associated with the rise of noncommunicable diseases such as overweight, obesity, diabetes, food allergies, and colorectal cancer as well as other conditions such as mental disorders. Microbial interventions that range from transplanting a whole undefined microbial community from a healthy gut to an ill one, e...