A review: modified agricultural by-products for the development and fortification of food products and nutraceuticals

Producing more food for a growing population in the coming decades, while at the same time combating environmental issues, is a huge challenge faced by the worldwide population. The risks that come with climate change make the mission more daunting. Billion tons of agriculture by-products are produced each year along the agricultural and food processing processes. There is a need to take further actions on exploring the inner potential of agro-waste to stand out as food ingredient to partially or fully substitute the foods in orthodox list. Some of the agro-waste contains the most valuable nutrients in the plant and it is truly a “waste” to dispose any of them. Furthermore, the paper aims at discussing the possible methods of modification to improve the safety and feasibility of the agro-waste either through physical, chemical or microbiological ways. The safety issues and bioactivity contains in the agro-waste also been discussed to present the better overall ideas about the employing of agro-waste in food applications

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference