Functional Food and Chronic Disease

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to contribute to a Special Issue of the journal Applied Sciences, “Functional Food and Chronic Disease”.

Chronic diseases are multifactorial pathological conditions considered to be a serious public health problem, accounting for about 60% of deaths worldwide.  A disease is considered chronic if it has a duration of more than 3 months since its incidence. Chronic diseases are difficult to recover from, and owing to the associated after-effects, require long-term treatment and observation. Foods and natural products or ingredients can be used to help treat, suppress, or prevent chronic diseases. Claims linking the consumption of functional foods or food ingredients with health outcomes require sound scientific evidence.  Therefore, research into the impact of food or natural products on chronic diseases is under demand, and the results should provide useful data on food to guide health policies toward the promotion of health.

Chronic diseases include various cancers; cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension, myocardial infarction, and stroke; chronic liver diseases, such as diabetes and hepatocirrhosis; chronic kidney failure; dyslipidemia; arthritis and osteoporosis; obesity; asthma and other atopic diseases; and chronic respiratory diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In particular, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the implementation of national-level measures by designating cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, and cancers with high disease burdens worldwide as major chronic diseases.

Health functional foods have been studied widely and are used to prevent such chronic diseases and to relieve the associated symptoms. This Special Issue, “Functional Food and Chronic Disease”, focuses on the functional evaluation and mechanistic research of functional foods and ingredients in the prevention and suppression of chronic diseases. Articles on a wide range of related topics are also welcome. The target materials can include the food itself, food extracts, natural substances, specific ingredients of food, and any other subject of relevance to the topic. For this Special Issue, we welcome a broad range of article types, such as research methods including in vitro, in vivo, and epidemiological studies; reviews; systemic reviews; and clinical trials.

We look forward to your participation.

Prof. Hae-Jeung Lee
Prof. Dr. Jae-Suk Choi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.