Dear Colleagues,

Food chemistry has a strong multidisciplinary value that allows it to span from the elucidation of the chemical composition and nutritional properties of natural and processed foods to the study of dietary supplements and functional foods, the reclamation and valorization of food waste, the investigation of toxicological and contamination issues in food, and the development of highly innovative food analytical techniques, also applied to quality control procedures. As a consequence, food chemistry requires diverse but complementary skills and competencies, and often brings together experts from different disciplines, with positive implications for congruent issues, such as human nutrition and well-being and environmental health.

In recent decades, the growing knowledge of the beneficial effects of foods containing molecules with antioxidant function, combined with the assumption that a number of common synthetic antioxidants may have harmful effects for the consumer, has led the food chemistry community to strengthen research in the field of natural antioxidants. Natural antioxidants are not only able to scavenge free radicals, but can also inactivate metal catalysts by chelation, reducing hydroperoxides into stable hydroxyl derivatives, and interacting synergistically with other reducing compounds. Therefore, they are generally multifunctional in both food and biological systems, as they help the food matrix to prevent its quality deterioration, while keeping its nutritional value, and, at the same time, they support consumer health by discouraging these oxidative stress phenomena, which are involved in cancer, arteriosclerosis, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases, as well as aging processes.

Notorious sources of natural antioxidants are vegetables, fruits, herbs, medicinal plants and spices. Additionally, a wide variety of agricultural residues and food by-products have recently been demonstrated to be potential sources of natural antioxidants. In this case, however, they often present disadvantaging organoleptic profiles, scarce consumer acceptance, and require safety testing.

Within this context, the main lines of research that could be addressed in this multidisciplinary Special Issue are:

• The elucidation and characterization of antioxidant molecules in (novel) plant foods;
• The reclamation and valorization of agrifood waste with valuable antioxidant potential;
• The development of appropriate protocols—in terms of solvent extraction, isolation procedures, purity of active compounds—to obtain functional plant extracts or even isolated natural compounds with valuable antioxidant activity;
• The safety testing and development of protocols to reliably evaluate the activity of natural antioxidants.

We are delighted to invite you to contribute your latest research findings in this Special Issue, with the hope of emphasizing the potential for multidisciplinary approaches to the complex set of challenges observed in the study of natural antioxidants.

Dr. Nicola Cicero
Prof. Dr. Giuseppa Di Bella
Guest Editors

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• antioxidant foods
• functional foods
• biological activity
• bioactive compounds
• natural products
• polyphenols