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Oxidative stress, characterized by an imbalance favouring oxidants over antioxidants, is a key contributor to the development of various common diseases. Counteracting these oxidants is considered an effective strategy to mitigate the levels of oxidative stress in organisms. Numerous studies have indicated an inverse correlation between the consumption of vegetables and fruits and the risk of chronic diseases, attributing these health benefits to the presence of antioxidant phytochemicals in these foods. Phytochemicals, present in a wide range of foods and medicinal plants, play a pivotal role in preventing and treating chronic diseases induced by oxidative stress by working as antioxidants. These compounds exhibit potent antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, anticancer, and protective properties against cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, obesity, and neurodegenerative conditions. This comprehensive review delves into the significance of these compounds in averting and managing chronic diseases, elucidating the key sources of these invaluable elements. Additionally, it provides a summary of recent advancements in understanding the health benefits associated with antioxidant phytochemicals.

Food computing refers to the integration of digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and data-driven approaches, to address various challenges in the food sector. It encompasses a wide range of technologies that improve the efficiency, safety, and sustainability of food systems, from production to consumption. It represents a transformative approach to addressing challenges in the food sector by integrating AI, the IoT, and data-driven methodologies. Unlike traditional food systems, which primarily focus on production and safety, food computing leverages AI for intelligent decision making and the IoT for real-time monitoring, enabling significant advancements in areas such as supply chain optimization, food safety, and personalized nutrition. This review highlights AI applications, including computer vision for food recognition and quality assessment, Natural Language Processing for recipe analysis, and predictive modeling for dietary recommendations. Simultaneously, the IoT enhances transparency and efficiency through real-time monitoring, data collection, and device connectivity. The convergence of these technologies relies on diverse data sources, such as images, nutritional databases, and user-generated logs, which are critical to enabling traceability and tailored solutions. Despite its potential, food computing faces challenges, including data heterogeneity, privacy concerns, scalability issues, and regulatory constraints. To address these, this paper explores solutions like federated learning for secure on-device data processing and blockchain for transparent traceability. Emerging trends, such as edge AI for real-time analytics and sustainable practices powered by AI–IoT integration, are also discussed. This review offers actionable insights to advance the food sector through innovative and ethical technological frameworks.

Onions (Allium cepa L.) are widely consumed worldwide and are recognized for their high content of bioactive compounds with potential health benefits. This study investigates the nutritional and phytochemical properties of three onion varieties—Tropea red onion, red onion, and yellow onion—analyzed in their whole form as well as in their peel and pulp. An innovative drying system was employed to assess its impact on the retention of bioactive compounds. The results highlight significant differences in nutrient composition among varieties and onion parts. The peel exhibited the highest concentrations of proteins, phenolic compounds, flavonoids, and antioxidants, followed by the whole onion and pulp. Tropea red onion stood out for its superior antioxidant capacity, vitamin C content, and phenolic acid levels, reinforcing its potential for functional food applications. This study also revealed that mineral content, particularly calcium, potassium, and sulfates, varied across onion varieties, influencing their nutritional and health-promoting properties. These findings support the valorization of onion byproducts for their bioactive potential and sustainability in the food industry. The data emphasize the need for further research on innovative processing techniques that enhance the bioavailability and effectiveness of onion-derived health-promoting compounds.

Tuna is the world’s most commercially valuable fish. More than 60% of tuna fish caught worldwide is used by the global canned tuna industry. The latter industry had revenue exceeding $20 billion in 2024. Before being packaged by canned tuna industrial companies, tuna’s meat is cooked. The broths that derive from the tuna cooking process are fed to a wastewater treatment plant together with scraps that derive from the cutting phase of the raw tuna, the blood and the so-called sawdust composed of small fragments from the cutting are sent to the water treatment plant along with the aqueous exudate released by the tuna in the conditioning phase after cooking. Dubbed herein “TunaMud”, we show in this study that the sewage sludge residue resulting from wastewater treatment at canned tuna industry factories is a multi-purpose fertilizer. Tested on arboreal (olive and pomegranate), herbaceous (pepper and lettuce), and horticultural (onion) plants, TunaMud improved the growth parameters of all plants grown, as well as the quality of fertilized soil. A biological resource so far disposed of as biowaste at substantial economic cost is thereby turned into a valued fertilizer. Along with recent outcomes concerning tuna industrial processing waste upgrade into valuable bioproducts via the LimoFish process, these findings close the material cycle through technically and economically viable circular economy processes for all by-products of the global canned tuna industry, including the mud-like residue from the wastewater treatment plant. While the use of food waste as fertilizer is not new, the innovation of this work lies in valorizing a previously unstudied industrial residue: the wastewater-treatment sludge generated specifically by the tuna-canning process. The composition of TunaMud, arising from a unique combination of cooking broths, blood, cutting scraps, and conditioning exudates, has no equivalent in the existing literature on organic fertilizers. The study further introduces a genuinely interdisciplinary approach that integrates green chemistry, wastewater engineering, agronomy, circular-economy analysis, and public-health considerations. Besides providing farming companies with a multi-purpose organic fertilizer free of antibiotics, these findings provide the canned tuna industry with the opportunity to save substantial waste disposal costs that in Europe approach €300/t. Benefits of TunaMud employment may be significant also for public health and the environment. Manure contaminated with antibiotics and resistant bacteria quickly increases the amount of antibiotics residues and antibiotic resistance genes, reducing the microbial diversity of the soil and driving widespread antimicrobial resistance. The approach to use fish biowaste as a source of organic fertilizers produced using innovative green chemistry (AnchoisFert) and green chemical engineering (TunaMud) technologies, provides an example of the required integration of disciplines working with industry to foster human health along with that of animals, plants and wider ecosystems. The use of locally produced waste marine biomass, naturally free from antibiotics, significantly reduces dependence on fertilizer markets, while lowering and stabilizing agricultural production costs. By transforming an abundant, renewable, and underutilized resource into a valuable agricultural input, this approach strengthens local economies and supports environmental sustainability. For public health systems, reducing the spread of antibiotics and antibiotic-resistance genes into agricultural soils directly addresses one of the key global priorities.

The growing interest in precision agriculture has led, in recent years, to an increase in the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the service of smart agriculture to optimize agricultural production processes through the monitoring of environmental conditions and prevent food loss. This work stems from research conducted as part of the Tech4You project, where the enabling digital technologies developed in Spoke 6 contribute to the advanced solutions envisaged by Spoke 3 to facilitate the transition to a sustainable agrifood system. In particular, we present the design and evaluation of a multi-hop Device-to-Device (D2D) communication architecture that leverages Long Range (LoRa) technology, specifically designed for monitoring vineyards in the context of passito wine production. The proposed framework addresses the challenge of monitoring mobile containers for grapes during the drying phase, a critical stage in which inadequate temperatures and humidity can promote the growth of fungi and the formation of mycotoxins. The integration of simulation-based performance evaluation with a multi-layer system architecture is presented in this work. The objective is to compare the performance of different routing strategies in choosing data forwarding paths to the gateway. The simulation results show that the proposed routing strategy, which is based on learning but also focuses on energy consumption, offers good performance. In particular, it achieves packet delivery rates of over 92% and preserves over 95% of active nodes after 2 h of operation. Energy-aware routing strategies also perform well compared to those that only consider the distance from the destination, but overall, the proposed strategy achieves a better trade-off on the metrics analyzed.

Honey is a natural food widely consumed due to its high content in nutrients and bioactive substances. In order to prevent hive infections, xenobiotics such as pesticides and antibiotics are commonly used. Chloramphenicol (CAP) is a broad-spectrum antibiotic used to treat honeybee larvae diseases. However, CAP has toxic and nondose-dependent effects in sensitive subjects; for this reason, its use has been prohibited in food-producing animals, such as the honeybee. In this study, we proposed a rapid, simple, and cheap analytical method, based on salting-out assisted liquid-liquid extraction coupled with UHPLC MS/MS detection for the accurate determination of CAP in honey to be used in routine analyses. The parameters that influence the extraction efficiency have been optimized using an experimental design in order to maximize the recovery of the analyte by reducing the matrix effects. Therefore, the developed method was internally validated according to the 2002/657/EC Decision guidelines and applied to the analysis of 96 honey samples.

Ochratoxin A (OTA) contamination presents significant risks in viticulture, affecting the safety and quality of wine and grape-derived products. This study introduces a groundbreaking method for early detection and management of OTA, leveraging environmental data such as temperature and humidity. A function derived from chemical analysis was developed to estimate OTA concentrations and used to label a synthetic dataset, establishing safe thresholds. Two AI models were trained: one for the detecting of OTA presence and the other for classifying the concentration range. These models were deployed on a M5Stick C+, a microcontroller designed for real-time data processing. The inference process is optimized for rapid response, requiring minimal time to deliver results. Additionally, the low power consumption of the M5Stick C+ ensures that the device can operate throughout the harvest period on a single charge. The system is able to transmit inference data via MQTT for real-time analysis. This comprehensive approach offers a scalable, cost-effective, on-site solution that is autonomous, eliminating the need for domain experts and extensive resources. The robustness of the system was demonstrated through its consistent performance across multiple test sets, providing an effective enhancement to food safety in grape and wine production. The study also details the system architecture, describes the function used for data labeling, outlines the training and deployment processes of the models, and finally, assesses the testing of the overall system.

Valorisation of food by-products has recently attracted considerable attention due to the opportunities to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of the food production chain. Large quantities of non-edible parts of the artichoke plant (Cynara cardunculus L.) comprising leaves, stems, roots, bracts, and seeds are discarded annually during industrial processing. These by-products contain many phytochemicals such as dietary fibres, phenolic acids, and flavonoids, whereby the most challenging issue concerns about the recovery of high-added value components from these by-products. The aim of this work is to develop a novel valorisation strategy for the sustainable utilisation of artichoke leaves’ waste, combining green pressurised-liquid extraction (PLE), spectrophotometric assays and UPLC–HRMS phytochemical characterization, to obtain bioactive-rich extract with high antioxidant capacity. Multivariate analysis of the major selected metabolites was used to compare different solvent extraction used in PLE.

Food waste is a serious problem for food processing industries, especially when it represents a loss of a valuable source of nutrients and phytochemicals. Increasing consumer demand for processed food poses the problem of minimizing waste by conversion into useful products. In this regard, onion (Allium cepa) waste consisting mainly of onion skin is rich in bioactive phenolic compounds. Here, we characterized the flavonoid profiles and biological activities of onion skin wastes of two traditional varieties with protected geographical indication (PGI), the red “Rossa di Tropea” and the coppery “Ramata di Montoro”, typically cultivated in a niche area in southern Italy. The phytochemical profiles of exhaustive extracts, characterized by ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with ultraviolet (UV) detection and high-resolution mass spectrometry, revealed that flavonols and anthocyanins were the characteristic metabolite classes of onion skins. Quercetin, quercetin glucosides and their dimer and trimer derivatives, and, among anthocyanins, cyanidin 3-glucoside, were the most abundant bioactive compounds. The potential of onion skins was evaluated by testing several biological activities: ABTS/oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) and in vitro alpha-glucosidase assays were performed to evaluate the antioxidant and anti-diabetic properties of the extracts and of their main compounds, respectively, and proliferative activity was evaluated by MTT assay on human fibroblasts. In the present study, by observing various biological properties of “Rossa di Tropea” and “Ramata di Montoro” onion-dried skins, we clearly indicated that this agricultural waste can provide bioactive molecules for multiple applications, from industrial to nutraceutical and cosmetical sectors.

Learning how discoveries in chemistry are made and utilized by the users of innovation in chemistry offers several benefits both to chemistry innovation practitioners and to research policy makers. We study the research and societal impact of three discoveries in chemistry reported between 2002 and 2022. The analysis confirms that, also in chemistry, science does not develop in a linear fashion, and that scientific developments continue to occur, driven by curiosity from self-determined researchers whose work is driven by intrinsic motivation relying on intellectual gratification. Companies in numerous industrial sectors, well beyond the chemical industrial sector, greatly benefit from chemistry innovation developed at public research institutes and universities. An obvious consequence is that policy makers should continue to support the work of chemistry research institutions using taxpayer money, leaving researchers free to choose research topics and the way to conduct research.