Nanocurcumin

The development of functional foods has been widely recognized to be an effective strategy to improve health effects or reduce the risks of a number of chronic diseases. The key to fabricate functional foods is to ensure that they should contain an appropriate amount of bioactives with well-recognized bioactivities. However, many important bioactives (e.g., phenolic compounds) are poorly insoluble, and thus low in bioavailability, which greatly limits the development of related functional foods. This limitation can be well overcome by the innovative emerging nanotechnology. The nanoencapsulation by a number of strategies has been demonstrated to not only remarkably improve the solubility, stability and bioavailability of poorly soluble bioactives, but also provides a novel solution to develop a series of functional foods for human health benefits.

Nanocurcumin: Encapsulation Strategies, Characteristics and Applications provides the state-of-art overview of nanoencapsulation techniques for transforming poorly soluble curcumin (a most widely recognized bioactive with a wide range of bioactivities) into nanostrutured or nanoencapsulated curcumin ('nanocurcumin') with improved properties, suitable for functional foods formulations.

Aimed to inform people in the academia or R&D of companies who work on the encapsulation of poorly soluble bioactives (beyond curcumin) for food formulations, development of functional foods, and food nanotechnology, with an extensive and advanced knowledge of the field.