African Functional Foods and Beverages: A Review

ABSTRACT

Functional foods contain health-promoting ingredients, which make them beneficial to humans and potentially help in disease prevention or treatment. The demand for functional foods is growing not just in the developed regions, but also in the developing regions of the world such as in Africa due to heightened consumer awareness on the role of foods in human health. African functional foods are foods of African origin that possess various characteristics like prebiotic, probiotic, satiety, immune modulation, stress-reduction, improved memory, and cardiovascular benefits. Traditionally fermented functional foods prepared from cereals like maize, millet, or sorghum abound in many African countries. Traditional fermentation, often spontaneous, utilizes a mixed culture of microorganisms mostly belonging to the lactic acid bacteria and yeast groups. The present review corroborated these pieces of information into the famous African functional foods and beverages, their sources, and quality attributes. Furthermore, functional foods were explained in very clear terms while evaluating the relationship between functional foods and African consumer’s health benefits. The study peaked at future work and further considerations on the potential of common functional foods from Africa, which are cheap and readily available to the people.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• functional foods
• traditional fermentation
• beverages
• health

Key points

Functional foods offer health benefits.

They contain ingredients to improve health.

Acknowledgments

The authors are both grateful to the Smart Agriculture Research and Application Team, Faculty of Applied Sciences, and Faculty of Environment and Labour Safety, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for their support.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Author contributions

TJA conceptualized the manuscript. SAOA planned the work. Both TJA and SAOA researched, wrote, revised, and edited the manuscript into the final draft.