The primary role of diet is to provide sufficient nutrients to meet the metabolic requirements of an individual and to give the consumer a feeling of satisfaction and wellbeing through hedonistic attributes (such as taste). In addition, by modulating specific physiological targets, diet can have an additional function: beneficial physiological and psychological effects beyond the widely accepte...

The use of functional foods (probiotics and prebiotics) has been demonstrated to be effective for the treatment or control of several diseases. Further well designed trials to examine the effects of different probiotic components are required. It is important to establish separate functions and to gain further insight into the underlying mechanisms that include competitive exclusion and modific...

Despite the high potential to increase sustainability of food systems, wastes and byproducts occurring in the food supply chain are currently only partially valorised at different valueadded levels. First-generation valorisation strategies that aim at utilisation of complete material streams for production of animal feed, energy, compost and/or specific consumer applications are already widely ...

Lactic acid bacteria found as sub-dominant component of the human and animal microbial gut represents one of the most significant groups of probiotic organisms. During the last decade probiotics become an important and viable ingredient in the functional foods as well as the pharmaceutical industry. In this paper, we shall review the most important findings with regards to the in vitro screenin...

European regulations mandate that only substantiated and approved statements can be used as nutrition- and health-related claims in food marketing. A thorough understanding of consumer perceptions of these approved claims is needed to assess their impact on both the purchase intention of functional foods and the development of innovative functional food concepts. In this paper, a conceptual fra...

The main objective of this survey is to reveal the relationship between lifestyle, health behavior, and the consumption of functional foods on the basis of Grunert's food-related lifestyle model. In order to achieve this objective, a nationwide representative questionnaire-based survey was launched with 1000 participants in Hungary. The results indicate that a Hungarian consumer makes rational ...

It is beneficial for both the public health community and the food industry to meet nutritional needs of elderly consumers through product formats that they want. The heterogeneity of the elderly market poses a challenge, however, and calls for market segmentation. Although many researchers have proposed ways to segment the elderly consumer population, the elderly food market has received surpr...

Lactobacillus helveticus MIMLh5 was selected for its strong cinnamoyl esterase activity on chlorogenic acid and employed for the preparation of a food product containing a high concentration of free caffeic acid. The novel food product was demonstrated to display high total antioxidant power and potential probiotic properties.

There has been an increase in the knowledge and interest on nutrition, and functional foods have gained popularity over the last few decades, and the trend is increasing. Probiotics and prebiotics are among the most studied functional foods. Nutrition economics has been defined as the discipline dedicated to researching and characterising health and economic outcomes in nutrition for the benefi...

The public’s interest in and spending on probiotics and “functional foods” that claim to provide a health benefit beyond basic nutrition have been climbing steadily. Often marketed through directto-consumer advertising, they are seen as natural alternatives to traditional Western medicines. Unfortunately, their purported efficacy is often not justified by unbiased studies, nor does the Food and...