Traditional Fermented Foods: Challenges, Sources, and Health Benefits of Fatty Acids

Abstract

Traditional fermented foods harbor microbes that transform raw food components, improving their nutritional, shelf life, organoleptic, and health-promoting characteristics. Fermented foods are an important conduit of contact between bioactive components that act like antigens and the human body system. Versatile microbes in traditional fermented foods are associated with many health-promoting end-products, including dietary fatty acids and inherent fermenting microbial cells. Evidence shows that dietary fatty acid components regulate genes in a hormonally dependent manner, either directly via specific binding to nuclear receptors or indirectly by changing regulatory transcription factors. Fatty acids are implicated in anti-inflammatory, anti-obesogenic, immunoregulatory, cardioprotective, etc., activities. Challenges with scaling the production of traditional fermented foods stem from losing effective consortiums of microbial groups and the production of differential end-products. Industrialists scaling the production of traditional fermented foods must overcome safety and consistency challenges. They need to combine processes that lessen the advent of public health issues and introduce omics technologies that identify and maintain effective consortium groups, prune genes that code for toxic products, and inculcate microbes with additional beneficial characteristics. Incorporating omics in production will avail the benefits of traditional fermented foods to a larger population that craves them outside their native areas.