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Visual perception plays a key role in the selection of nutritious and healthy foods. Color, as one of the most important senses of vision, can be used as an indicator of food quality/defects and grade. It is recommended consumers include various colors in their plate to obtain various vitamins and minerals. Color is also thought to be related to antioxidant capacity. Within this regard, this study investigated the relationship between color and antioxidant capacity in various fruits and vegetables. The results indicate the color hues analyzed by computer vision based image analysis can be related with TAC of fruits and vegetables, but with some limitations and can be used as a guide for food selection to increase daily antioxidant intake. Most of fruits and vegetables having hue values above 180° and below 20°, have high antioxidant capacity (>10 mmol TE/kg fresh weight). The results also emphasized the importance of the serving size of fruits and vegetables in terms of their contribution to daily antioxidant intake. Based on these results, fruits and vegetables could be categorized into low-, medium-, and high-antioxidant groups according to their TAC and potential contributions to fulfill the recommended daily antioxidant intake. Finally, daily antioxidant intake was evaluated with a healthier scenario created by doubling vegetable portion and reducing fruit portion by half in the meal.

Dietary antioxidants play an important role in human health by counteracting oxidative stress and preventing chronic diseases. Most common dietary antioxidants in foods are vitamins, carotenoids, phenolic compounds, sulfurcontaining compounds, and neoformed antioxidants. Antioxidants may be present in free soluble or bound insoluble forms in foods. Antioxidants bound to insoluble food matrices have gained the spotlight because they exert their antioxidant effects much longer than free soluble ones. A direct procedure called QUENCHER has been shown to accurately measure the antioxidant capacity of antioxidants bound to insoluble matrices. This procedure overcomes the drawbacks of extraction-dependent classical assays leading to underestimation of the total antioxidant capacity (TAC) of foods. This review focuses on antioxidants that are found naturally in foods or are formed in foods during processing specifically the antioxidants bound to the insoluble food matrices. The literature gap on the importance of bound antioxidants, their physiological relevance, and methods for measurement of their antioxidant capacity will be filled by this comprehensive review. In particular, chemical properties and health effects of food antioxidants, measurement of the TAC of foods by the QUENCHER method, digestion behavior of bound insoluble antioxidants, and their interactions with free soluble antioxidants are discussed throughout this review.

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