Journal of Food Quality
Volume 2019 (2019), Article ID 9594646, 2 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/9594646

Editorial

Quality of Phenolic Compounds: Occurrence, Health Benefits, and Applications in Food Industry

Amani Taamalli,¹ María del Mar Contreras,2,3 Ibrahim M. Abu-Reidah,⁴ Najla Trabelsi,⁵ and Nabil Ben Youssef⁶

¹Department of Chemistry, College of Sciences, University of Hafr Al-Batin, Hafr Al-Batin, Saudi Arabia
²University of Cordoba, Cordoba, Spain
³Department of Chemical, Environmental and Materials Engineering, Universidad de Jaén, Campus Las Lagunillas, 23071 Jaén, Spain
⁴Arab American University, Nablus, State of Palestine
⁵Laboratory of Olive Biotechnology, Center of Biotechnology of Borj Cedria, Borj Cedria, Tunisia
⁶Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia

Correspondence should be addressed to Amani Taamalli; amani.taamalli@cbbc.rnrt.tn

Received 22 July 2019; Accepted 24 July 2019; Published 2 September 2019

Copyright © 2019 Amani Taamalli et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Phenolic compounds are widespread phytochemicals in nature. This means that these compounds cannot be synthesized in the human body and are mainly taken from food and medicinal herbs. Over the past years, plant extracts rich in phenolic compounds have shown increasingly interest to enhance food quality. Moreover, their therapeutic use as functional ingredients has been the basis of numerous studies. Nonetheless, there is still much work to do. In this special issue, the published studies give new insights into how processing affects the phenolic composition of foods and the bioactivity of nanoencapsulated phenolics on cancer cells.

Olives and olive oil are a natural source of polyphenols. Their health effects are closely related to their phenolic compounds and their antioxidant activities. However, the table olive industry requires reducing the bitterness of olive phenolic compounds when looking for tasteful products. In this case, processing methods, including acid, base, and/or enzymatic hydrolysis, have been revised as well as the novel technologies that aim to face environmental sustainability challenges. In another context, centrifugation, storage, and filtration can have an impact on the content of minority compounds in olive oil, including phenolic compounds. This has been evaluated and related to olive oil quality.

Cereals, especially whole grains, are important sources of dietary polyphenols. Physicochemical processing may influence the phenolic composition of grains, and this has been summarized in this special issue in order to provide the basis for promoting the development and utilization of cereals.

In the case of blackberry fruits, the effect of some organic fertilization treatments along with harvest date and storage time has been evaluated on two blackberry cultivars. It has been shown that different physicochemical and antioxidant properties of the fruits could potentially provide different shelf-lives during their commercialization in the market as fresh products.

Nanoparticle delivery systems have successfully been used to encapsulate bioactive compounds and deliver them to intended targets. In this sense, this special issue includes a study on nanoencapsulated phenolics from Callistemon citrinus extract, berberine, and combination of both that enhanced their bioactivity against three breast cancer cell lines by nearly 2-fold.

We are pleased to present this special issue, which includes the aforementioned studies with interesting results concerning the relationship of the trinomial food processing, phenolic compounds, and quality.

Conflicts of Interest

The editors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the contributions of the authors as well as all the valuable work of the reviewers in the evaluation process.

Amani Taamalli
María del Mar Contreras
Ibrahim M. Abu-Reidah
Najla Trabelsi
Nabil Ben Youssef