The Added Value of Technology in Food Integration - Holistic Approach

Abstract

The increasingly widespread consequences of globalization, and of an incongruous and unbalanced distribution of food, between geographical areas with reduced threshold of access to food, and industrialized areas where there is excess food and overeating, raise the urgent problem of proper regulation and management of all available food resources. The emergence and expansion of diseases related to malnutrition and hypernutrition have reached pandemic and irreversible dimensions and, despite the excessive exploitation of water resources and primary food sources and the total depletion of natural resources, a positive solution has not yet been found. Industrial food production has been introducing new standards in the quality and consumption of nutrients, which are increasingly poor, with increasingly intensive and less controlled production systems. The attempt to correct the wrong eating habits and inadequate lifestyle, with the intake of nutrients and active ingredients to fill dietary deficiencies, has not been producing the desired effects. Nutraceuticals and the related sciences Nutrigenomics and Microbiomics, which should provide the basis for healthy nutrition and the correct information for the use of functional foods, too often are at the service of food multinationals, to promote the spread of an indiscriminate and massive use of supplements.