(127b) Environmental Pollution By Food Wastes and By-Products: Employing Probiotics for Their Valorized Conversion into Nutraceuticals.

In recent decades, food industries around the world have generated enough waste to significantly contribute to the net emissions of greenhouse gases and other forms of environmental pollution. Across the food supply chain: from cow to cream, sea to spoon and even farm to fork, large amounts of food waste are generated. On another note, the rise in demand for nutraceuticals and foods with enhanced health benefits has risen across the globe. This is partly associated with the rising cases of diverse health disorders that are supposedly associated with exposure to environmental pollutants arising from food processing factories. Several constraints have been observed to be associated with the cost-effective production of nutraceuticals. The prominent ones are related to raw material substrates, efficient processing methodologies, resulting impacts of such processes on the environment and the overhead costs involved. Probiotics have been known to impart desirable health benefits when consumed in adequate amounts. They are natural, sustainable (both in acquisition and usage), and biocompatible with the human system. Consumption of probiotics, food products processed with probiotics, or food materials with probiotics in their matrices have been observed to constitute minimal side effects relative to highly processed foods formulated with various additives. Food wastes have been studied and appraised as suitable ingredients that are useful as encapsulating carriers for the consumption and effective delivery of probiotics in the human gut. In addition, food macromolecules such as polysaccharides, lipids and proteins are usually degraded into smaller fractions of enhanced health benefits during probiotic fermentation. In addition, the employment of probiotics for both small and industrial scale processing of nutraceuticals portends a sustainable route with lesser deleterious impacts on the environment. The greener approach to processing nutraceuticals with probiotics will be discussed in this research session to further advance their application at all potential levels.