Everything Should Be as Simple as It Can Be. But Not Simpler. Does Food Lipid Oxidation Require an Omics Approach?

Abstract

Lipid oxidation remains a major challenge for the food industry and for researchers. Current methods and knowledge often fail to adequately represent what is consistently observed in real systems. Practical experience strongly suggests the need for new paradigms to fully comprehend lipid oxidation. This viewpoint article aims to mention some critical aspects of current approaches in evaluating lipid oxidation in food systems, and to search for new epistemological and therefore experimental approaches by adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. Herein, suggestions are formulated for a holistic perspective by combining elements ranging from philology to community ecology and systems biology. Lipids undergoing oxidation are compared to ecological communities and living systems, to be considered as a whole, whose patterns change with space and time. As omics is an inductive, hypothesis‐generating, circular approach, involving multiparametric analysis, data integration/fusion, and multivariate statistical analysis (both supervised and unsupervised), it could thus provide a useful contribution to better understanding of oxidation and antioxidation processes, enabling laboratory results to be matched with what is observed in real complex foods. Practical applications: There is still a large gap between the wealth of natural compounds with antioxidant activity and the availability of natural products able to prevent rancidity in food products. Moreover, healthy, highly unsaturated fatty acids still require appropriate methods to monitor oxidative spoilage. Dispersed systems and multidomain foods pose new daily challenges regarding oxidation assessment and control. These are critical issues in the food industry, indicating the need to identify a new approach to lipid oxidation in food systems, and this viewpoint article is a contribution to the ongoing debate. A new epistemological paradigm for lipid oxidation in food systems. It consists of the reiteration of hypothesis‐generating studies (oxidomics), requiring multiparametric, comprehensive profiling of the oxidation patterns (oxidome) and their changes. The outcome is a progressive improvement in the knowledge of complex systems and the selection of appropriate predisposition, prognostic and diagnostic marker patterns for the oxidation process.

Radical Scavenging Activity of Olive Oil Phenolic Antioxidants in Oil or Water Phase during the Oxidation of O/W Emulsions: An Oxidomics Approach

“…To this aim, five volatile markers were chosen, deriving from the decomposition of hydroperoxides from oleic ( Figure 4 A), linoleic ( Figure 4 B), and linolenic ( Figure 4 C) acids [ 31 , 32 ]. The choice of more than one volatile marker (usually hexanal) would allow for the obtaining of a more complete picture of the occurring phenomena [ 8 , 19 , 33 ].…”

“…It is noteworthy that considering the only hexanal, as usually appears in the literature, as a secondary oxidation marker, would have led to the misleading conclusion that OPAs in the water phase were more effective towards secondary oxidation. The adopted oxidomics approach, instead, allowed to depict a more complete view of the mechanisms of action of these molecules [ 5 , 8 , 11 , 12 ].…”

“…Moreover, several contributions have recently suggested the expansion of traditional analytical patterns to a wider range of oxidation products to better understand oxidative phenomena [ 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Three distinct viewpoints by Paradiso, Villeneuve, and Laguerre discussed the need for a new step to study lipid oxidation in emulsified systems by focusing on different aspects [ 8 , 9 , 10 ]. They stressed the importance of investigating some crucial parameters, up to now underestimated, that may govern antioxidant efficiency like the role of the transport of reactive species by surfactant micelles, the impact of smaller droplets in poly-dispersed systems, the application of multiparametric approaches to the analysis of oxidation reactions, and the development of spatially and temporally resolved models for lipid oxidation.…”

Toward a Spatiotemporal Model of Oxidation in Lipid Dispersions: A Hypothesis‐Driven Review

“…Although it is hard to imagine at first glance how such models might be more effective, perhaps we could be more inspired by phenomena that, in essence, could resemble lipid oxidation, at least in some important points; a trans-disciplinary approach recently encouraged by two excellent review articles. [65,66] In this way, we wish to suggest that inspiration can be found from bottom-up prediction models of forest fire such as those based, but not only, on cellular automata, which are models of physical systems where space and time are discrete, and interactions are only local (i.e., neighbor-to-neighbor). Cellular automata consist in regular grids of cells (trees) that are at different states (on/off; burnt/unburnt; oxidized/nonoxidized).…”

Fatty acid ethyl esters in virgin olive oils: a correlation study with the volatile profile

“…It was followed by (a) trans-2-hexen-1-ol, having green and pungent notes, deriving from the reduction trans-2-hexenal by alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) (Bedoukian, 1971;Morales et al,1997); (b) hexanal, resulting from both enzymatic oxidation and autoxidation of linoleic acid (Zunin et al, 2004) and responsible for the sensory notes of green, apple, cut grass (Morales et al, 1997); (c) hexan-1-ol, originating from hexanal through the activity of ADH and responsible of fruity, aromatic, soft, cut grass notes (Angerosa et al, 2004); (d) ethanol, aring from fermentation and responsible for sensory notes of alcoholic, ripe apple, floral (Reiners and Grosch, 1998); (e) cis-3-hexen-1-ol and trans-trans-2,4-hexadienal, responsible for banana, leaf-like, green-fruity, pungent and cut grass notes, respectively (Angerosa et al, 2004); (f) ethyl-acetate, that may be synthesised through a different pathway (Salas, 2004;Kalua et al, 2007), responsible for sweet and aromatic notes (Morales et al, 1997). Both nonanal, deriving from autoxidation of oleic acid (Paradiso et al 2016 and considered a marker of olive oil oxidation, and hexanoic acid, formed by oxidation of the corresponding aldehyde (Paradiso et al, 2018b), were present in very small amount, indicating a low incidence of the phenomenon of auto-oxidation in the examined samples.…”