After a long period from the birth of mankind to recent times, in which the main objective of agriculture and food was to feed people, in recent years the objective has evolved to make people healthier by increasing life expectancy. This can be seen in the strategies of large companies such as Nestlé, Danone, and many others, which have transformed themselves from food companies to nutrition and health companies, as can be seen in their mottos and mission statements that talk about health or life. As a result, many food manufacturers are seeking to make health claims for their products, making health and nutrition communications a central part of their marketing strategy and launching initiatives to help address human health challenges. These challenges include the control of effective delivery mechanisms in addition to the identification of health-promoting substances. In this development, food authorities and scientists have a great responsibility to help consumers adopt sustainable and healthy behaviors and not fall into the commercial traps posed by supposedly healthy products that have no bioactivity or, worse, negative effects.

In this context, many questions arise regarding the quality of bioactivity from agricultural products to food and consumers (Figure 1). The purpose of this review paper is to address these issues and highlight the challenges of using antioxidants and bioactives in foods (Figure 1). Issues have been selected from the expertise of the authors, discussions carried out at L’Institut Agro Dijon with worldwide experts, and published reviews and lectures. Examples illustrating these issues are proposed by authors from their own experience.

The global economy is so hungry for healthy products that many companies that make food, from small start-ups to the largest multinationals, dream of finding the right product that will allow them to have nutritional claims on their product. However, many companies do not have the expertise to find the right product. When visiting the largest food fair in the world, the Salon International de l’Alimentation (SIAL), year after year, it is amazing to see that in some countries almost all exhibitors present the same plant extract. The search for new bioactives is a real problem, and looking at old herbal books and pharmacopoeias several centuries old, it seems that despite new technical and scientific possibilities to evaluate the activity, most of the active ingredients have been known for centuries ^[1]. Most attention is given to a small list of “superfruits/superplants” that are being advanced in agricultural development programs. However, the discovery of some new plant varieties with great bioactivity may shake up some communities or regions.

In the present communication era, the influence of marketing on consumer decisions is more than crucial and, unfortunately, sometimes leads to the challenge of “food for profit” instead of “food for life”. When communicating about bioactives that may be present in some plants, it sometimes seems as if the world goes crazy about a single plant. The first data are often collected on samples used in traditional medicine. This communication about the superpower of bioactives creates a demand from companies and/or consumers. As an initial impact, the harvest increases dramatically to change the scale from a traditional community’s pharmacopeia to supplying the world market with healthy products. If possible, the products are then cultivated. The history of Vietnamese ginseng (Panax vietnamensis Ha et Grushv., Sâm Ngoc Linh and varieties) illustrates this classic scheme. This plant has long been used in the traditional pharmacopeia of the Xedang ethnic minority living in the mountains of central Vietnam near the Laotian border, but was unknown outside this area for most of history. In 1973, it was discovered by people outside the ethnic minority and became very popular. About 10 years later, it received its name ^[2], and, according to Le courrier du Vietnam (published on 31 July 2011), was included in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of endangered species only a decade later [1,3]^[1][3]. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species was established in 1964 and has evolved to become the world’s most comprehensive source of information on the global status of animal, fungus and plant species threatened with extinction. It is a powerful tool for informing and catalyzing biodiversity conservation and policy changes, critical to protecting the natural resources that humanity needs to survive ^[4]. Fortunately, the P. vietnamensis Ha et Grushv. species has been conserved with great effort in the same primary forests where it was discovered ^[5]. The price offered for the plant for use as a bioactive or for cultivation purpose was so high that it was overexploited by the local population. Meanwhile, other highly valuable species that can grow only in the same mountain forests were cultivated in the same places (e.g., Amomum tsaoko Crevost et Lemaire/Tsao-Ko Cardamon ^[6]), creating competition among the Red List species culture in a place that was previously a primary forest ^[7].

When possible, crops are grown on accessible land, but because active compounds and especially antioxidants are produced by plants in response to stress, we must face the fact that sunlight, moisture, temperature, and especially temperature fluctuation often reduce the plant’s need for antioxidant compounds and thus its bioactivity ^[8]. With intensive agriculture, a plant can also be loaded with agricultural chemicals. It is usually considered that the benefits of eating plants counterbalance the effect of the phytochemicals contained in the plant. However, in the case of expensive superfruit preparation, this interest may be questioned.

For high value-added plants, a hydroponic system can allow growers to cultivate them under perfect growing conditions and without pests [9,10]^[9][10]. For example, tropical ginseng can be cultivated in Belgium, which brings controlled health benefits [11,12]^[11][12]. In this case of cultivation for a company far from the origin of the plant, the Nagoya Protocol now guarantees benefit-sharing with the community living at the cradle of the plant, despite numerous gray areas in this protocol [13,14]^[13][14].

As intensive culture can reduce plant bioactivity, the use of microorganisms during culture for triggering or afterward, during a fermentation of the product can lead to higher bioactivity [15,16]^[15][16]. For example, elicitation by fungi has been used to produce glyceollin in soybeans ^[17]. These phytoalexins from soybeans have antibacterial, antifungal, and antinematode activity, as well as antiproliferative, antiestrogenic, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anticholesterolemic activity. Therefore, they are being investigated for their medicinal properties against hormone-dependent cancers and metabolic and cardiac diseases ^[18]. They are formed by P450-mediated hydroxylation of 3,9-dihydroxypterocarpan following induction of this enzyme after elicitation by Aspergillus spp. ^[19]. Bioactive substances can also be produced by chemical or biotechnological synthesis. Although chemical synthesis generally has a bad image, biotechnological production can be interesting because it can be produced under the label of natural and organic production. Such production can also be sustainable if the compounds are produced from renewable crops, even more so if they are derived from waste or by-products ^[20]. If they are produced with a microbial producer hidden in the food (under the label “starter”), they can be suitable for a clean label strategy [21,22]^[21][22]. Unfortunately, it is often observed that a single compound does not have the same properties as the whole plant. A well-known example of bioactivity in flavor is the use of vanillin instead of vanilla. While vanillin brings the vanilla flavor to chocolate, vanilla enhances the overall flavor of chocolate, resulting in a complex flavor that is not dominated by vanilla flavors ^[23]. In some cases, the mechanisms of interaction between the bioactive and other components are known, such as the better stability of lycopene in plants compared to isolated lycopene, which can be explained by the protective role of other carotenoids in Gac (Momordica cochinchinensis Spreng.) [24,25]^[24][25].

Despite the drawbacks of using less stable or less effective antioxidants through strategies that attempt to control nature, some producers may be tempted to use genetically modified organisms (GMO) to produce an isolated active ingredient or to increase the production of active ingredients in the plant. Because perceptions of these strategies vary widely around the world (depending on the general perception of the populations about whether man can improve the nature through science or whether changes always bring catastrophic side effects) there are different perceptions about whether GMO-made products used for health or for food present an actual risk or not.