Foodomics is a discipline that studies the Food and Nutrition domains through the application and integration of a variety of omics tools (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics/lipidomics) together with chemometrics and bioinformatics tools. Foodomics can greatly improve our understanding of the complex diet – individual interplay, involving different Food Science research areas dealing with food composition, food safety, quality and traceability issues, as well as the food impact on individual’s health/illness status. In the case of food adulteration, mislabeling and fraud, either unintentional or deliberate, is a worldwide and growing concern. Current challenges associated with food authentication comprise mislabeling of organically produced food products or genetically modified organisms, substitution of species for one of a lower quality and price, protection of geographic origin, breed/variety identification, or undeclared components labeling, among other topis. Another major goal of Foodomics is to understand the bioactivity of food and food ingredients in our body at the molecular level. In this sense, many studies have suggested that diet and/or food components can prevent the onset of Alzheimer Disease. Phenolic derivatives and terpenoids from olive leaves have been deeply investigated, and our group has demonstrated that olive leaves by-products have neuroprotective potential based on in vitro experiments.
