Editorial: Enhancing functional dairy foods: Bioactive compounds in fermented matrices

Abstract

Functional foods generate health benefits to consumers beyond their basic nutritional value (Granato et al. 2020). Many of them contain biologically active substances (known as bioactive compounds), that can be naturally present in the raw material, or that are formed or added during food processing. They are capable of modulating metabolic processes, resulting in the promotion of health benefits to brain, heart, immune system and reduce the risk of chronic diseases, when are consumed by human beings (Park and Oh, 2010). In current markets, technological innovation represents a competitive strategy for marketing, and in the category of functional foods, the greatest innovation occurs in dairy products. Dairy foods containing or enriched in bioactives like lipids, peptides, fibers, plant de