Abstract
Health promotion and reducing disease risk are the primary benefits of functional foods. However, the definition of functional foods is still unclear and undecided. This has made it difficult to produce a general consensus of functional food products and consumers often have to rely on companies rather than an official definition. As a result, the Functional Food Center (FFC) has previously proposed a multi-step outline of the processes needed to develop a functional food product and ways to introduce them to the market. This process of identifying a functional food involves rigorous, systematic research to determine the nutritive components of the food that promote positive health effects. An integral step that functional food science uses to identify functional foods is to determine the food bioactive compound(s) that influence beneficial health. Food bioactive compounds are the foundations to all functional foods and come from a variety of sources, like plants, mushrooms, and animals. While more research needs to be done on food bioactive compounds, this is the first step closer to legitimizing functional foods. The purpose of this review is to support appropriate and advanced research methods for the identification and screening of food bioactive compounds to define and legitimize the health claims of functional foods. In addition, this review will also discuss the future of food bioactive compounds with our current understanding of them.Keywords: functional foods, bioactive compounds, anti-inflammatory, health, nutrition, bioavailability, biomarkers, extraction