Could peony seeds oil become a high-quality edible vegetable oil? The nutritional and phytochemistry profiles, extraction, health benefits, safety and value-added-products

Abstract

Edible oil provides essential nutrients for human body and plays a very important role in human health. Looking for edible oil resource plants with high content and high-quality oil plays an important role in ensuring the adequate supply of edible oil. Peony seeds oil (PSO) was approved as a new resource food and became an edible vegetable oil for its rich content of fatty acids, total unsaturated fatty acids, linoleic acid and linolenic acid. In addition, PSO also contains high contents of squalene, tocopherol, phytosterol and plant polyphenol. PSO has been reported to present various health benefits including antioxidation, blood lipid reduction, hepatoprotection, immunity regulation, blood sugar control, neuroprotection, anti-inflammatory, cytotoxic activity, therapeutic effects on scald, uvioresistant effects and so on. Toxicity studies showed PSO had great safety without any toxic and side effects, and could be processed to produce PSO microcapsule, microemulsion, nanoemulsion gel, biscuit, daily chemical products, soft capsule and other high value-added-products. Therefore, the present article aims to summarize the research findings regarding to the nutritional and phytochemistry profiles, the extraction methods, health benefits, safety and the high value-added-products of PSO. These informations laid a good foundation for the in-depth research and development of PSO, and also proved that PSO was a high-quality edible vegetable oil with health value. With the deepening of research, the studies on PSO will be more and more comprehensive. It believes that PSO will become an important functional edible oil, and will be more widely used as an important functional food and linolenic acid supplement.