To meet consumers’ demand for natural foods, edible oil producers and food processing industries are searching for alternatives to synthetic antioxidants to protect oils against oxidation. Antioxidant compounds extracted from different plant parts (e.g., flowers, leaves, roots, and seeds) or sourced from agri-food industries, including residues left after food processing, attract consumers for their health properties and natural origins. This review, starting from a literature research analysis, highlights the role of natural antioxidants in the protection of edible oils against oxidation, with an emphasis on the emerging and sustainable strategies to preserve oils against oxidative damage. Sustainability and health are the main concerns of food processing industries. In this context, the aim of this review is to highlight the emerging strategies for the enrichment of edible oils with biomolecules or extracts recovered from plant sources. The use of extracts obtained from vegetable wastes and by-products and the blending with oils extracted from various oil-bearing seeds is also pointed out as a sustainable approach. The safety concerns linked to the use of natural antioxidants for human health are also discussed. This review, using a multidisciplinary approach, provides an updated overview of the chemical, technological, sustainability, and safety aspects linked to oil protection.

We investigated fruit physical traits and nutritional value in both seed and flesh in eight Moroccan date palm varieties. The greatest values of weight for whole fruit, flesh, seed, and flesh percentage were found in “Boufgous,” “Agondari,” and “Bouskri.” These two later varieties displayed also their superiority with respect to proximate composition. For fruit flesh, proximate composition, energy value, and reducing capacity ranged as follows: proteins (1.60–3.53%), moisture (5.31–17.31%), ash (2.08–2.50%), lipids (0.32–1.09%), carbohydrates (76.69–90.18%), energy value (338.30–385.89 kcal/100 g), and reducing capacity (100.14–1607.12 mg GAE/100 g). Corresponding values in seeds were as follows: proteins (3.20–5.00%), moisture (1.42–4.14%), ash (1.14–1.50%), lipids (6.30–7.40%), carbohydrates (83.39–85.55%), energy value (417.06–429.51 kcal/100 g), and reducing capacity (1427.71–6843.84 mg GAE/100 g dry weight). Among all minerals (K, Ca, Mg, B, Fe, Cu, Mn, Na, and Zn) found in both fruit parts, K had the highest records for both flesh (12047 mg/kg) and seed (6127.6 mg/kg), followed by Mg and Ca. Seeds lipidic fraction was dominated by monounsaturated fatty acid C18 : 1 (47.5%), followed by saturated fatty acids mostly C12 : 0 (18.0%), C14 : 0 (10.5%), and C16 : 0 (10.6%) and finally polyunsaturated fatty acid C18 : 2 (8.8%). It could be concluded that investigated varieties presented a great importance from a nutritional point of view, and seeds could present important opportunities of valorization.

Oil oxidation is the main factor limiting vegetable oils’ quality during storage, as it leads to the deterioration of oil’s nutritional quality and gives rise to disagreeable flavors. These changes make fat-containing foods less acceptable to consumers. To deal with this problem and to meet consumer demand for natural foods, vegetable oil fabricators and the food industry are looking for alternatives to synthetic antioxidants to protect oils from oxidation. In this context, natural antioxidant compounds extracted from different parts (leaves, roots, flowers, and seeds) of medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) could be used as a promising and sustainable solution to protect consumers’ health. The objective of this review was to compile published literature regarding the extraction of bioactive compounds from MAPs as well as different methods of vegetable oils enrichment. In fact, this review uses a multidisciplinary approach and offers an updated overview of the technological, sustainability, chemical and safety aspects related to the protection of oils.