Functional Aspects of Antioxidants in Traditional Food

Abstract

Antioxidants have become one of the hottest topics in the modern food industry, not only as food additives preventing oxidative changes, but also as food components acting in vivo after ingestion. According to their mechanisms of activity, antioxidants have been divided into two basic groups: primary antioxidants or donators, so-called preventive antioxidants, and secondary antioxidants or the acceptors, the so-called chain-breaking antioxidants. In recent years, researchers have turned their attention towards phenolic compounds, secondary metabolites of the plant world, which are highly bioactive. Today, the food industry needs to search for other innovative sources of antioxidants that could be consumed everyday and that would lead to a healthier life, that would be acceptable to consumers, safe, with a high potential, cheap, and biologically active in low concentrations.