Artificial Intelligence in Functional Food Ingredient Discovery and Characterisation: A Focus on Bioactive Plant and Food Peptides

Scientific research consistently demonstrates that diseases may be delayed, treated, or even prevented and, thereby, health may be maintained with health-promoting functional food ingredients (FFIs). Consumers are increasingly demanding sound information about food, nutrition, nutrients, and their associated health benefits. Consequently, a nutrition industry is being formed around natural foods and FFIs, the economic growth of which is increasingly driven by consumer decisions. Information technology, in particular artificial intelligence (AI), is primed to vastly expand the pool of characterised and annotated FFIs available to consumers, by systematically discovering and characterising natural, efficacious, and safe bioactive ingredients (bioactives) that address specific health needs. However, FFI-producing companies are lagging in adopting AI technology for their ingredient development pipelines for several reasons, resulting in a lack of efficient means for large-scale and high-throughput molecular and functional ingredient characterisation. The arrival of the AI-led technological revolution allows for the comprehensive characterisation and understanding of the universe of FFI molecules, enabling the mining of the food and natural product space in an unprecedented manner. In turn, this expansion of bioactives dramatically increases the repertoire of FFIs available to the consumer, ultimately resulting in bioactives being specifically developed to target unmet health needs.

Specialised dental services and referral pathways

The term ‘oral health’ not only defines a state of being free from oral and facial pain, diseases and disorders, but alsoencapsulates the impact that such disease may have on an individual’s quality of life, considering both the functional (biting, chewing, smiling, speaking) and psychosocial aspects of wellbeing. Despite the well-established relationship between oral health and overall health and wellbeing, the separation of medicine and dentistry, both educationally and organisationally, results in unmet health needs and poorer patient outcomes. This article aims to give an overview of available dental services, referral pathways and how general practitioner and dentists can work together to provide holistic, patient-centred care.