*1.1. Food Databases and Nutrition: The Current Context*

Research exploring relationships between diet and health have, in recent decades, garnered increasing interest in biologically active components in foods alongside nutrients. In addition to nutritional function, bioactive components of the diet have potentially beneficial health properties, which has led to greater perception of foods as functional ingredients or nutraceuticals. Moreover, new properties attributed to nutrients, and the interactions between nutrients and bioactive compounds, are also being explored. Food, nutrition, and health are linked, but detailed knowledge of nutrient compositions and bioactive characteristics is needed to understand these connections, and data characterizing bioactive compounds are required.

**Citation:** Durazzo, A.; Astley, S.; Kapsokefalou, M.; Costa, H.S.; Mantur-Vierendeel, A.; Pijls, L.; Bucchini, L.; Glibeti´c, M.; Presser, K.; Finglas, P. Food Composition Data and Tools Online and Their Use in Research and Policy: EuroFIR AISBL Contribution in 2022. *Nutrients* **2022**, *14*, 4788. https://doi.org/10.3390/ nu14224788

Academic Editor: Laura Di Renzo

Received: 30 September 2022 Accepted: 4 November 2022 Published: 12 November 2022

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In this context, the development of specialized databases for components with nutritional and nutraceutical properties, as well as updating food composition databases (FCDBs) and publishing other specialized datasets (e.g., plant botanicals), at national and European levels, to supply knowledge that can help reduce the burden of chronic diseases and adopt sustainable nutrition patterns, is a challenge [1–4].

Food composition compilers aim to produce, collect, and present data in standardized formats to "speak a common language": this allows comparisons across national databases and fosters exchange and collaboration among countries [5,6]. Simultaneously, researchers are publishing databases compiling information about metabolites in humans and identifying novel dietary biomarkers.

Databases comprised of nutrients, bioactive compounds, metabolites, or food supplements are essential tools for understanding human nutrition and public health and are vital resources for nutritionists, dietitians, food developers, and researchers, with a range of different applications, e.g., dietary assessment, exposure studies, food labeling, epidemiological studies, clinical research, nutritional education, and support for food industries and SMEs for nutrient labeling and health claims. These databases are exploited in epidemiology, food production and nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, and therapeutic interventions, and research trends are frequently redefined.

Initial construction of a dataset for nutrients, bioactive compounds, or compounds classes, and their inclusion in a specialized database, should be monitored to ensure approaches are standardized and database functionalities harmonized with existing resources. Moreover, updating and expanding existing databases, as more comprehensive resources, should be encouraged, perhaps through certification. Databases dedicated to particular or characteristic categories of foods are also valuable (e.g., traditional and ethnic foods, and recipe databases). Traditional and ethnic foods should also be included in national FCDBs and recipe collections. These foods constitute an important part of culture, history, identity, heritage, and local economy of a region or country and are key elements in the dietary patterns of each country [7,8].

Databases dedicated to bioactive compounds, particular individual classes of compounds, as reported by Scalbert et al. [9], can fail to reflect numbers and diversity of chemical features, range of dietary sources, variability from one source to another, and different procedures used to extract compounds as well as analytical techniques used. Additional factors that should be considered are that (i) only a few compounds within a class are investigated, and (ii) there is a lack of appropriate well-documented analytical methods [9] for application in food research.

Technological advances that allow management of "big data", management of distributed and secured data using blockchain or process data using natural language processing, algorithms, or artificial intelligence are relatively new in the exploitation of food composition data. Nevertheless, technologies, tools, and infrastructures are now emerging with properly orchestrated processes leading to delivery of more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) big data ecosystems [10–15].

In this context, this communication aims to describe the contribution of the international, member-based, non-profit association EuroFIR AISBL to the status of FCDBs and related information being published in Europe and beyond.

## *1.2. EuroFIR AISBL: Role, Organization, and Main Features*

The mission of EuroFIR AISBL is to promote harmonization and exploitation of highquality food composition data and foster cooperation and participation in development with national compiler organizations. EuroFIR AISBL coordinates activities with experts and national compilers, contributing to worldwide efforts to produce and maintain highquality food information, datasets and tools.

EuroFIR AISBL was formed in 2009, arising from the European Food Information Resource (EuroFIR) Network of Excellence (Grant agreement ID: 513944) and NEXUS project (2005–2013, Grant agreement ID: 265967) [16], to ensure sustained advocacy for food information in Europe and beyond in partnership with FAO INFOODS, and facilitate improved data quality, storage and access, and reuse for research and commercial purposes.

To provide a brief snapshot of the research history and status related to the contribution of EuroFIR to food information databases and nutrition fields, a quantitative literature analysis was carried out on 6 June 2022 using Scopus (https://www.scopus.com/home.uri, accessed on 6 June 2022). The search string "EuroFIR" was used, and bibliographic data (i.e., year, count, document type, origin, institutions, etc.) were recorded. Scopus functions "analyze" and "create citation report" were utilized for basic analyses. The search returned 101 documents covering the period 2005–2022, and the main subject areas were *Agricultural and Biological Sciences*, *Nursing*, *Medicine*, and *Chemistry*.

The oldest work was published by McKevith, B. in the journal *Nutrition Bulletin* during 2005 and describes working towards a European food information resource—EuroFIR, but also more specifically FCDBs or tables to be used by dietitians and health professionals, food manufacturers and producers, and other researchers; keywords for this paper were database; European Commission; food composition; and food information resource [17]. Further works, published in 2006, were "EuroFIR update—One pagers and web features" [18], as well as a paper published by the network describing development of a comprehensive, coherent, and validated food composition databank in Europe for nutrients [19]. The most cited work was by Trichopoulou et al. [20], where the importance of including traditional foods in current national FCDBs was highlighted. Papers identified in the search, distributed by typology mainly included, "articles" (74.3%), "reviews" (9.9%), "conference papers" (6.9%), and "book chapters" (3%) (data from Scopus database). Two documents belonging to "editorial" category were also reported, one dedicated to the Second International EuroFIR Congress 2007 [21], and the other to the 3rd International EuroFIR Congress 2009 [22].

Limiting the search to documents including "EuroFIR" as a keyword identified 35 publications, the most recent of which was published by Westenbrink et al. [23] and focused on EuroFIR activities to improve harmonization of documentation for aggregated/compiled values in FCDBs. Kapsokefalou et al. [5] described challenges related to quality of food composition data with a particular emphasis on needs in the Mediterranean area. Machackova et al. [24] published guidelines for calculating nutrient contents of foods by calculation for food business operators. Some works published in 2016 addressed (i) EuroFIR quality approaches for managing food composition data [25]; (ii) implementation of EuroFIR document and data repositories as accessible resources of food composition information [26]; and (iii) GAMA-EuroFIR guidelines for the assessment of methods of analysis [27].

The "full records and cited references" (document title, citation counts, abstract, author, and index keywords) were exported and processed using VOSviewer software (version 1.6.16, 2020; www.vosviewer.com, accessed on 6 June 2021) [28–30]. In total, 58 terms were identified and are visualized as a term map in Figure 1. Figure 1 allowed for the identification of terms correlated with research related to EuroFIR activities, and existing research focused on these topics. Among recurring keywords, food composition, food analysis, Europe, food composition database/s, database (factual)/factual database, human/s, data base, food quality, nutrition, nutrition value, information processing, food, quality control, data quality, nutrient content, nutritional assessment, reference database, food composition data, documentation, food intake, food packaging, food industry, diet, information storage, database system, software, and dietary intake appeared most.

**Figure 1.** Term map for EuroFIR activities. Bubble size represents numbers of publications. Bubble color represents citations per publication (CPP). Bubbles are closer to one another if terms coappeared more frequently (bibliometric data were extracted from Scopus and elaborated using VOSviewer software).
