The interactions between food components and human nutrition

Abstract

As announced in the January editorial of IJFST, a number of virtual issues have been planned in 2018 to celebrate recently published papers focussed on a key area of research. In January, we launched the virtual issue on ‘Recent advancements in Wine Science’ which featured an editor's selection of 10 of the most influential papers on wine science published in IJFST in the last two years. This virtual issue is still available on the journal's website. I would like to announce the second virtual issue of the year ‘Advancements in dietary interventions for nutritional disorders’. There can be little argument that the relationship between food and human health has featured very highly in the attention of both the consumer and the food industry in recent years. The manipulation of diabetes and obesity is one of the current challenges food researchers are engaged with, and this is demonstrated by articles investigating the potential beneficial effects of cocoa (Mellor & Naumovski, 2016), legumes (Reynolds et al., 2016), combinations of soy milk and probiotics together with prebiotics (Liu et al., 2017; Xie et al., 2017) and collagen from fish material (Zhang et al., 2016). The role of dietary fibres and plant bioactive ingredients has been recognised as vital components of a healthy diet as evidenced by the article by Grundy et al. (2016) on the potential use of almonds in improving digestive health, as well as the manuscript illustrating the role of whole grains and resistant starch in terms of insulin control (Aggarwal et al., 2017). Part of these benefits may be due to the rich sources of antioxidant material in plant‐based foods (Su et al., 2017). This is especially true when considering the functional benefits of tea polyphenols (Zhao et al., 2017), and how these polyphenols may modulate intestinal microflora and hence obesity and diabetes (Guo et al., 2017). Good news for consumers who regularly drink green tea. The virtual issue is available from April 2018, and the articles will be free to read and download for a period of three months. I hope that you find this collection of papers interesting to read and lead you onto further research work conducted by the authors and their co‐workers.