More than one billion tons of the food produced in the world ends up being wasted every year, accounting for about one-third of the food produced globally. For this reason, the problem of food waste management has been the focus of the different actors intervening in the food supply chains, who recognize that food waste has not only environmental but also economic and social impacts. This review focuses on foods of plant origin wasted at different stages of their life, namely primary production, transformation/processing, transportation, sales, catering and the domestic level. It addresses the subject from multiple angles, considering the environmental, economic and social perspectives. The review was based on a search carried out within scientific databases, for example, ScienceDirect, Scopus and the Web of Science. The results highlighted that in the generation and management of food waste from plant origin, there is a clear difference between developed and developing countries, with these last showing higher losses in production, principally the transportation and storage of the foods. Contrarily, in developed countries, excess food produced and not consumed is the strongest contributor to food waste. Valorization of agricultural waste and industrial residues for application into animal feed or agricultural fertilizers, or through the recovery of valuable compounds for industrial purposes, are some of the ways to deal with food waste while generating additional economic value and reducing environmental impact. However, there is still a need to modify processes and behaviors to reduce food waste and improve the sustainability of supply chains. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct research to identify and report food waste so that stakeholders can contribute positively to solving this problem.
In recent years, food nutrition estimation has received growing attention due to its critical role in dietary analysis and public health. Traditional nutrition assessment methods often rely on manual measurements and expert knowledge, which are time-consuming and not easily scalable. With the advancement of computer vision, RGB-based methods have been proposed, and more recently, RGB-D-based approaches have further improved performance by incorporating depth information to capture spatial cues. While these methods have shown promising results, they still face challenges in complex food scenes, such as limited ability to distinguish visually similar items with different ingredients and insufficient modeling of spatial or semantic relationships. To solve these issues, we propose an Ingredient-Guided Semantic Modeling Network (IGSMNet) for food nutrition estimation. The method introduces an ingredient-guided module that encodes ingredient information using a pre-trained language model and aligns it with visual features via cross-modal attention. At the same time, an internal semantic modeling component is designed to enhance structural understanding through dynamic positional encoding and localized attention, allowing for fine-grained relational reasoning. On the Nutrition5k dataset, our method achieves PMAE values of 12.2% for Calories, 9.4% for Mass, 19.1% for Fat, 18.3% for Carb, and 16.0% for Protein. These results demonstrate that our IGSMNet consistently outperforms existing baselines, validating its effectiveness.
Valeriy V. Pak, Olim K. Khojimatov, Gulnara J. Abdiniyazova
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Abstract Background In Uzbekistan, local people consumed camel milk products since ancient time. Camel milk is a source of energy and nutrients which are consumed as raw or fermented products and also provides various potential health benefits for human. Methods The data were collected during 2016–2018 by expeditions in desert and semi-desert regions of Uzbekistan. Three hundred sixty sheets of plants have been collected from those regions. Forty-two samples of raw camel milk were collected at two periods of the year: 21 samples during summer (June, July, and August) and 21 during winter (December, January, and February). Results and discussion Analysis of the composition of camel milk samples revealed the particular richness of camel milk in protein and fat content. Average values of protein and fat were found as 4.04 ± 0.36% w/v and 4.89 ± 0.26% w/v, respectively. Analysis of the composition of camel milk showed that protein, fat, and dry matter contents were comparatively lower in the summer period. Also, it was found that the average values of all components decreased from December to February and had a tendency to grow from June to August. This finding suggests a seasonal variation in available food supply. Investigation of an available fodder flora revealed that a fodder base consists of around 300 plants. Analysis of plant species revealed that 30 plants were widely used in traditional medicine. Conclusion Our results suggested that the healing benefit of camel milk can be connected with higher content of proteins including the various protective proteins and with secretion of the bioactive compounds from plants with medicinal properties via food.
AbstractThe Maillard reaction products (MRPs) most widely used as markers of the nutritional quality of foods are furosine, Nε‐carboxymethyllysine (CML), hydroxymethylfurfural, pyrraline, pentosidine and pronyl‐lysine. One of the MRPs identified first was furosine, which was quantified in foods 40 years ago as a chemical indicator of the Amadori compound Nε‐fructoselysine. Since then, furosine has gained broad attention by food chemists and biomedical researchers, as its formation upon heat treatment is well characterised. Moreover, it represents the Amadori products from early Maillard reactions in which amino acids react with reducing carbohydrates, resulting in a loss of their availability. This is of importance for the essential amino acid lysine, which is also the limiting amino acid in many proteins. In order to evaluate the nutritional quality of a protein, the concomitant analysis of free – and nutritionally available – lysine and the amount of lysine reacted to form the respective MRP is essential, even for mildly processed foods. The other chemical markers of heat treatment such as CML, pyrraline, pentosidine or pronyl‐lysine seem to be useful markers of the advanced stages of Maillard reactions. Compared to the conditions in which furosine is formed, these compounds are generated under more severe conditions of heat treatment. However, the concentrations analysed are significantly lower than those of furosine. Therefore, the nutritional evaluation of a food protein should include not only furosine, but also other chemical markers of heat treatment such as, for example, CML, pyrraline and pentosidine.
AbstractSeveral studies suggest that natural salicylates in plant‐based foods may benefit health. However, large variation in published values of the salicylate content of foods means that relating dietary intakes to disease risk is problematical. Consequently, we have systematically reviewed the available literature using prescribed selection criteria. By combining these literature values with in‐house analysis, we have constructed a food composition database describing median salicylate values for 27 different types of fruits, 21 vegetables, 28 herbs, spices and condiments, 2 soups and 11 beverages. Application of a validated food frequency questionnaire estimated median dietary intakes of 4.42 (range 2.90–6.27) and 3.16 (2.35–4.89) mg/day for Scottish males and females, respectively. Major dietary sources of salicylates were alcoholic beverages (22%), herbs and spices (17%), fruits (16%), non‐alcoholic beverages including fruit juices (13%), tomato‐based sauces (12%) and vegetables (9%). Application of the database to populations with differing dietary habits and disease risk profiles may provide further evidence for the role of dietary salicylates in the prevention of chronic diseases.
The perceived need to reduce dietary fat consumption has produced intense activity throughout the food industry. Previous exploratory work has indicated that flavour characteristics can influence consumer enjoyment of foods, and reducing the fat content of foods can adversely affect flavour characteristics in comparison with those of full‐fat equivalents. However, there is little work reported in this area in the scientific literature. The Leatherhead Food RA and the Institute of Food Research, Reading, are therefore collaborating on a MAFF‐LINK project with ten industrial partners on improving the flavour acceptability of reduced‐fat foods. The project aims to quantify and model the relationship between fat content and the perceived flavour and flavour‐release characteristics of processed foods and to provide guidance to the industrial partners in developing reduced‐fat foods with improved flavour characteristics.