*5.3. The Important Dimension of the Degree of Food Processing*

Therefore, FDBs must not be considered as a sufficient tool for reaching human health on a long term. Notably, one can fully address one's nutritional needs and become chronically ill, as is frequently observed in Western countries. This is notably due to the matrix quality of consumed calories, not only the quantity, and this quality may depend on the degree of food processing.

It is noteworthy that food engineers and food technologists have been, in the last three decades, dedicating a great part of their research to studies on reducing the processing load that can be achieved on the application of milder preservation technologies (still called emerging technologies). Such milder preservation technologies can be used alone or combined with less severe thermal treatments, such as high hydrostatic pressure [69], pulses of electric field [70], UV-c radiation [71], thermosonication [72], and others. The optimization of these processes aims at maximizing the retention of food nutrients such as vitamins [73], proteins, and sensory parameters such as texture, colour, and taste, while keeping the product safe [74,75].

On the other hand, in the circular economy model, food industries are expected to play a key role in tackling food loss and waste, which poses the double burden of depleting natural resources and wasting extra energy from production to disposal. Innovations that consist of using by-products of an industry as raw materials of another, as well as recovering nutrients that would otherwise be wasted are emerging tendencies within a biorefinery approach. An illustrative example is reported by Lucarni et al. 2020 [76], exposing a new class of ingredients that may not yet be adequately covered by FDB.

Considering industrially processed foods that are becoming dominant in our diets, in the future, FDBs should also distinguish between 'natural' and 'added' nutrients whatever they are and indicate the list of additives, as with the Open Food Facts database available online for industrial foods [77] or private pay-per-use food databases that also gives the list of ingredients, e.g., Alkemics and Num-Alim. More specifically, the Open Food Facts database is a collaborative database of food products and is licenced under the Open Database Licence (ODBL). For such foods, the list of ingredients tells us more about their whole nutritional quality (including environmental aspects) than the only composition.

Indeed, it should be underlined that no food is nutritionally balanced (except maternal milk for the growth of the infant), hence the recommendation to 'eat varied' at the level of the diet.
