An Overview of Natural Toxins in Food

In the 1990s, Bruce Ames published several works in which he showed how almost all the insecticide molecules present in our diets were of natural origin. These are molecules that plants produce to defend themselves from parasites and that are, therefore, real insecticides, whose toxicological analysis is, however, incomplete.

The synthesis of these molecules is inversely proportional to the presence of pathogens and, therefore, it is reasonable to believe that in the absence of treatments with synthetic insecticides, as happens in organic farming, these natural insecticides are more present, but to date, there is a lack of data that allow us to know if organic foods contain a greater quantity of these molecules.

The comparison of the toxicological risk between natural and synthetic insecticide molecules is also worthy of further study.

Nowadays, the concept of One Health is more and more widespread, but it is essentially limited to zoonoses or toxic infections of foods of animal origin. Little attention is paid to the presence of toxic molecules of plant origin or to bacterial contamination of fresh or processed plant foods.

The aim of this Special Issue is, therefore, to create a state of the art for the presence of natural toxic molecules present in plant foods, fresh or subjected to technological treatments, and to evaluate their real danger for human health.

Dr. Filippo Rossi
Guest Editor

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