The food colors are, in many countries, widely used to give food increased visual sensory quality, aiming, thus, the growth of the consumer market. Aware of this, the present work aimed to reevaluate the general properties of synthetic food dyes and natural pigments, the latter being generally used to replace the former. Then, the current analysis was based on the search for the strategy, selection of articles (with inclusion and exclusion criteria), eligibility, and data extraction. Thus, it was observed in studies that synthetic food dyes may cause several harmful effects to human health, among them, genetic damage and carcinogenicity. On the other hand, the use of natural pigments as an alternative to replace food dyes has been increasingly present in studies, presenting qualities that, previously, were not known, as is the case of anthocyanins, which have important physiological and ecological functions. It is also important to point out that the use of natural pigments goes beyond the limits of food, and are also found as sensitizers for solar cells, tissues, and medicines. Selected articles (47) leaded to a total of 72 distinct pieces of information, focused mainly on the biological activities and involving natural dyes and pigments. In short, the gradual replacement of dyes, currently used, still in large scale in some locations, by natural pigments, is already part of our present, allowing the creation of a future perspective with the production of processed foods without the damage that most of synthetic dyes produce to the human body.

With the growth of studies on the Chemistry of Coordination Compounds (subclass of a larger category known as Complexes), the pharmaceutical, medicinal and nutraceutical industries have benefited to use them in the synthesis of drugs and in laboratory experiments of food quality, for example. Therefore, the union of the knowledge about these compounds with the studies obtained from the so-called flavonoids (class of chemical compounds that are found mainly in fruits, teas, wine, etc.) brings many benefits such as studies of their antioxidant and anticarcinogenic potential. The main fact by which this class of compounds is manipulated in the form of binders in metallic centers is the stability of these when present in such compounds.

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