Bioactives and Functional Ingredients in Foods and Beverages 2.0

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to inform you that Molecules has launched the second edition of the Special Issue “Bioactives and Functional Ingredients in Foods and Beverage”.

Bioactives and functional ingredients are natural non-essential nutrients with the potential to exert health-protective or disease-preventive properties beyond their nutritive value. There are thousands of compounds, many of them understudied, that work differently, presenting a wide range of biological properties, namely: antioxidants, activators or inhibitors of enzymes, DNA protective compounds, hormone modulators, anti-bacterial, immune-modulatory substances, and so on.

Foods and beverages containing bioactives are already part of our daily diets, but it is expected that new designs and developments incorporating valuable bioavailable ingredients with the potential to modulate the metabolism and the physiological processes necessary for a claimed beneficial effect on the health of human subjects will arise—in particular, improving the current state of the art in demonstrating a cause–effect relationship between the consumption of the given food product and the health-promoting characteristic/s claimed, which are associated with the fully characterized bioactive molecules and metabolites in the food or the formulated edible product.

The present Special Issue intends to reflect, as far as possible, the recent advances connecting and integrating, “from farm to food and health”, the many factors involved in obtaining new foods and beverages enriched in bioactives and functional ingredients, as follows:

• The ingredient sourcing, its quality, and the sustainability of the production systems;
• The influence of the agronomical, industrial, and domestic processes to condition the maintenance of quality during shelf-life, and the expected functionality;
• The demonstration of biological effects based on studies of the quality, bioavailability, and bioactivity of new foods and beverages enriched in bioactive compounds; the elucidation of the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of the organic forms, conjugates, circulating forms of the bioactives; and the markers of intake and bioactivity, with the support of advanced omics technologies;
• The consumer-driven design of new foods and beverages, as well as the novel designs for specific population groups with special needs (e.g., aging adults, allergies, caloric intake control or restricted diets, chronic conditions, and immuno-depressed situations);
• And much more.

Dr. Débora Villaño
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. Molecules 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 2700 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.