Fermented food/beverage and health: current perspectives

Fermented products have been gaining a notable importance in recent years due to the health benefits that they can provide in relation to the initial unfermented food matrix, i.e. in the enhancement of nutrients, effect on glucose metabolism and bioactivity, the presence of probiotics in some foods. The paper gives a current analysis of the fermented food/beverage and health relationship studies present in the literature and it is based on a literature quantitative analysis approach. VOSviewer software was utilized to extract and elaborate bibliometric data. 1504 publications ranged from the year 1970 to 2022 were retrieved by literature search and were collectively cited in 25,868 documents. The subject areas mainly covered are: “Agricultural and Biological Sciences”, “Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology”, “Immunology and Microbiology” and “Medicine”. 1148 terms, in total, are identified and the top recurring terms on the fermented food/beverage and health research are: metabolism, lactobacillus, food microbiology, lactic acid, animals. The functionality of fermented foods are here explored. Innovation is represented towards obtaining specific fermented foods (i.e. yogurts), by changing the fermentation conditions, or by adding or removing compounds that alter the fermentation, and thus, with the improvement of technologies like nanotechnology, targeted nutrition and others, it is expected that fermented food will consolidate their position in the food market.