Sustainable exploitation of bioactive components from the Black Sea Area traditional foods (BaSeFood) KBBE-2008-2-2-02: Bioactive compounds in traditional food products - SICA (Black Sea Region). Call: FP7-KBBE-2008-2B

BaSeFood aims to promote sustainable development and exploitation of Traditional Foods of plant origin containing emerging bioactive compounds with putative health effects in the Black Sea Region (BSR). The objectives of BaSeFood are: To investigate the knowledge base of traditional foods of the BSR in order to identify those foods to be collected and analysed. To define, characterise and collect nutrient and bioactive data for a subset of about 30 prioritised traditional foods using previously developed and validated EuroFIR guidelines and bioactive databases, with appropriate analyses. To carry out case human intervention studies (priority: cardiovascular disease protection), supported by intensive in vitro and in vivo laboratory tests, to address the requirement for supporting evidence in nutrition and health claims. To accurately map and describe the flow charts of BSR traditional foods preparation and processing, and determine bioactive retention at both laboratory and pilot plant scale in close collaboration with industry partners. To evaluate attitudes of processors and consumers in order to optimise and enhance the whole food chain for improved availability and health benefits of BSR traditional foods. To widely disseminate results and findings in order to enhance awareness and sustainable development of traditional foods of the BSR for improved health. BaSeFood will address the main goals of the original call, in which core points were the substantiation of nutrition/health claims for traditional foods and the cooperation between researchers and stakeholders. BaSeFood activities will be anyway carried out in a frame of broad sense sustainability, in which issues of local communities, traditional foods, plant resources, biodiversity knowledge and preservation, will be also taken into account. The final aim is to put bioactive substances and related health claims in a favourable, consumers friendly, context, in order to give opportunities to all possible stakeholders, independently of strictly regulatory facts. The recent evolutions of the evaluations of the submitted health claims seem to fully support this integrated approach.