**Preface to "Nanomaterials to Enhance Food Quality, Safety, and Health Impact"**

Nanomaterials to Enhance Food Quality, Safety, and Health Impact provides overviews of the most recent fundamental and oriented efforts by multidisciplinary researchers and technologists in the application of nanoscience and nanotechnology to generate new added value solutions for the food industry.

Nanotechnology has significant potential to secure or even enhance food quality, safety, and health impact. Nanomaterials produced by nanofabrication or nanoencapsulation techniques provide alternatives to food fortification and to support their quality and safety by being added directly into a food matrix or into food contact materials, such as food packaging. In this sense, nanomaterials can be combined with technologies such as melt compounding, lamination, or electrohydrodynamic processing (EHDP) in the design of food packaging to promote passive, active, and even bioactive properties such as barrier, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and oxygen scavenging roles and the controlled release of functional ingredients. These attributes can be produced either by the intended or non-intended migration of the nanomaterials or by the active substances they may carry. Lastly, nanomaterials can be advantageously applied to provide unique opportunities in Circular Bioeconomy strategies in relation to the valorization of, for instance, agro-industrial wastes, and food processing by-products.

This book is divided into 15 chapters that aim to contribute to advancing knowledge about how nanomaterials can improve food quality, safety, and health. The first three chapters deal with nanocomposites prepared with cellulose nanomaterials, which are an alternative to conventional technologies for improving biopolymer passive properties. It includes two research articles devoted to the isolation of cellulose nanomaterials and their application in food packaging as well as one review focused on their inhalation risks. The next seven chapters discuss the use of nanomaterials to develop active packaging technologies based on both scavenging and releasing systems. All these research articles describe the intentional incorporation of active agents, such as antioxidants and antimicrobials, into packaging material that is thereafter released into and/or absorb substances from the packaged food or the environment surrounding the food. The book continues with three more chapters that present the use of nanotechnology in the field of intelligent or smart packaging. This part of the book includes two research articles and one review that describe the development of various nanomaterials that can allow food packaging to contain, evaluate, and transmit relevant information in a near future. The last two book chapters demonstrate the potential of nanotechnology to encapsulate and release bioactives or functional ingredients to provide health benefits and reduce the risk of diseases. This section is composed of an overview of the potential of nanomaterial applications in dietary supplements and foods for special medical purposes and a research article dealing with the nanoencapsulation of bioactives.

This book, which could be of interest to food scientists, food technologists, and food engineers, provides a source of up-to-date information and broadens the reader's horizons on the use of emergen<sup>t</sup> nanotechnologies to enhance food quality, safety, and health.

#### **Jose Mar´ıa Lagaron, Sergio Torres-Giner, Cristina Prieto**

*Special Issue Editors*
