ABSTRACT
Food systems are constantly changing to accommodate the advancement of societies. Increased challenges, including the World Wars, natural disasters, and the COVID-19 pandemic, have stimulated the improvement of the economics, quantity, and quality of food around the globe. Food security was introduced to alleviate and eradicate hunger and poverty with an aim to provide access to enough food and calories to everybody all the time. In society, this was translated to an increase in food rich in carbohydrates but not specifically all the nutrients and minerals required for healthy growth and development. Agriculturally, this has resulted in a rise in large-scale production of starch and filling food that can be used as staples worldwide. While hunger is not a problem in most countries, malnutrition is rampant on many levels. There are several cohorts of people suffering from metabolic disorders related to an imbalance in nutrients, including diabetes, obesity, and anemia, amongst others. The introduction of nutritional security is to ensure that everybody has access to nutrients from all food groups;this means proteins, carbohydrates, fibers, vitamins, and minerals. Rapid development in omics research has resulted in high-throughput techniques that can profile the makeup of crops, environmental samples, food, and human biofluids. Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics all explain how the different systems behave. Multi-omics is the assembly of all the complex data recorded to explain what is happening at a macroscale. This chapter provides an overview of the most up-to-date applications of multi-omics in food and nutrition security. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.
ABSTRACT
The pandemic situation due to COVID-19 has crippled the lives of the whole world population and has affected almost every individual in one way or the other. Researchers have been intrigued due to the increasing number of strains and symptoms. Several approaches have been used to control the spread of this highly infectious disease: early detection of the infected individual, development of a suitable drug and containment of the spread of this virus. Although, several vaccines have been developed, they have shown to have their own limitations and side-effects. One of the measures which has been adopted by the global health agencies is to educate people (infected or uninfected) regarding the maintenance of strong immune system to prevent the infection and lessen the health complications. There are several important factors which determine the immunity of an individual. Eating balanced diet and maintaining the proper supplication of nutritional components are being suggested by health experts to keep the immunity strong. Minerals and vitamins must be maintained in the diet for proper health and immunity. Vitamins have various roles in human physiology. In this review, the relevance of vitamins in the maintenance of immunity has been discussed and reviewed in prevention of adverse health effects of COVID-19.