Culinary herbs and spices have long been considered essentially as flavor enhancers or preservatives, with little attention given to their potential health-promoting properties. Nevertheless, recent research has shown them to be significant dietary sources of bioactive phenolic compounds. Despite noteworthy efforts performed in recent years to improve our knowledge of their chemical composition, a detailed phenolic profile of these plant-based products is still lacking. In the present work, antioxidant activities and phenolic composition of five herbs and spices, namely caraway, turmeric, dill, marjoram and nutmeg, have been studied. The use of liquid chromatography coupled to LTQ-Orbitrap mass spectrometry enabled the identification of up to 42 phenolic compounds. To the best of our knowledge, two of them, apigenin-C-hexoside-C-pentoside and apigenin-C-hexoside-C-hexoside have not been previously reported in turmeric. Qualitative and quantitative differences were observed in polyphenol profiles, with the highest phenolic content found in caraway. Multivariate statistical treatment of the results allowed the detection of distinctive features among the studied herbs and spices.

Olive oil is the main source of fat in the Mediterranean diet and the most frequently used ingredient in Mediterranean cuisine. Cooking with olive oil has been attracting attention because it can act as a food excipient, thereby increasing the bioaccessibility and bioavailability of ingested bioactive compounds. The aim of this study was to understand the effect of cooking with olive oil on the bioactive components in other ingredients (tomato, onion, and garlic) of sofrito sauce, a representative model of Mediterranean cuisine. After the cooking process, polyphenols from tomato, onion, and garlic were detected in the olive oil, especially naringenin, ferulic acid, and quercetin, as well as a high content of carotenoid Z-isomers, which are more bioavailable than the E-isomers. Therefore, traditional Mediterranean cuisine could play an important role in the health-improving effects of the Mediterranean diet.