Functional Foods: Process Technology, Beneficial Effects and Interaction with Gut Microbiota

Dear Colleagues,

Functional foods are foods with benefits beyond basic nutritional needs. They are usually enriched with probiotics, prebiotics, polysaccharides, polyphenols or polypeptides to improve health or reduce disease risk. The increased demand for healthy food recently stimulated a rapid increase in designing and processing functional foods. The effects of food structure and processing on bioaccessibility and the beneficial effects of functional foods have attracted increasing attention.

The gut microbiota plays an important role in maintaining host health via various molecular pathways. There is a bidirectional relationship between functional foods and gut microbiota. Functional food intake alters the composition and structure of the gut microbiota at the functional level, and in turn, the gut microbiota may affect the uptake and metabolism of functional foods. However, their interaction is complex and variable, and has not been fully recognized.

For these reasons, a Special Issue entitled “Functional foods: process technology, beneficial effects and interaction with gut microbiota” is being released, welcoming all those research and review articles that will help to further explore the process technology, beneficial function and mechanisms in functional foods.

All manuscripts should include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• The designing or processing of functional foods;
• The interactions of functional foods and gut microbiota;
• The beneficial effects of functional foods.

Dr. Leilei Yu
Guest Editor

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. Foods 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 2900 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.