Nowadays, there is a marked trend in the food industry towards the deverlopment and manufacture products.
This new class of food product has found a great success in the market due to the growing interest of consumers for healthy food. Functional food is generally defined as food that contains one or more functional ingredients that provides with an additional healt benefit beside the energetic and nutritional aspects that every food must confer
2.there are wide range of compound that are used or cloud be potentially employed as functional ingredients
3.carotenoids 4.polyphenols 5.and other axtioxident pigment 6.polyunsaturated fatty acids 7.among others 8.another important requirement for these functional ingredients is their natural origin, which is always preferred to the synthetic one.
These general characteristics have led to the increase on the research of new natural sources for this kind of compoynds. Plants such as rosemary oregano soybean tomato green tea and garlic have been descrided as improtant sources of bioactives.