In the 21st century, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and other chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancers, immune disorder, and chronic respiratory disease are becoming the leading preventable causes of global morbidity and mortality. Diet is considered as one of the main factors responsible for these diseases, and, thus, modification of diet and lifestyle habits is becoming a new strategy for their prevention/treatment. Foods are rich in compounds with potential bioactivity against these current diseases, and also recent molecular biotechniques were improved: thus, research in this area has been intensified in the last two decades. Due to their physiological and physicochemical versatility, food bioactive components are regarded as promising health-promoting alternatives to develop new functional foods.

We invite authors to submit original research and review articles on advances on foods as sources of bioactive compounds used or potentially useful to prevent/treat the different diseases of the 21st century. We are interested in manuscripts that explore the aspects of food sources of novel bioactive components, their biological activities demonstrated by animal models and human trials, and new strategies for designing future-active foods. The development of economically feasible large-scale technologies to produce bioactive compounds is of great importance to produce enough quantities of bioactive compounds for clinical trials and future commercial production. This special issue will become a forum for researchers worldwide to summarize the most recent studies in this field.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Effects of food bioactive compounds against obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome
• Antioxidant, antihypertensive, and anti-inflammatory food components: effects on cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disorders
• Dietary-derived compounds in cancer chemoprevention
• Role of foods and their compounds in allergy, autoimmunity, infection, or other immune disorders
• Gut microbiota and their health implications: a modulation by food components
• Mediterranean diet and its health promoting properties
• Role of bioactive compounds in aging
• Developmental origins of health and disease: role of diet and its bioactive components
• Interactions between food bioactives and genes: nutrigenomics research
• “Farm to cell” approaches
• Household food insecurity and health consequences
• Analysis of food additives and their health implications
• Development of economically feasible large-scale technologies to enable future commercial production of bioactive compounds