Nutritional properties and quality of apple fruits can be related to presence of secondary metabolite contents such as phytochemicals and mineral elements. In this paper, eight polyphenols, four major minerals (Na, K, Mg, Ca), total phenolic content and antioxidant capacity were determined in fourteen ancient apple cultivars grown in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Northeast Italy) to highlight their nutraceutical properties. Both apple peel and pulp were examined separately and results were compared to those of six widespread commercial cultivars using principal component analysis. Ancient apples had much higher content in healthful compounds with respect to commercial varieties, particularly in the peel. Ancient cultivars showed a superior antioxidant capacity in peel (3- to 9- fold) and in pulp (2- to 5-fold) compared to commercial cultivars, with a good correlation with total phenolic content (R = 0.83 in peel and 0.69 in pulp). The polyphenols that mostly characterized the ancient apples pulp were catechins and flavonols. Regarding macro elements, K and Mg content were higher in ancient cultivars, while Na and Ca showed no significant differences. In the perspective of a sustainable economic and social development of local agricultural realities, these results contribute to the valorisation of ancient local apple cultivars as invaluable reservoir of genetic biodiversity to be promoted as functional food or exploited in breeding novel apple hybrids with high nutraceutical properties and better resistance to parasites.

Effects of boiling and steaming cooking methods were studied on total polyphenols, antioxidant capacity, and biogenic amines of three green bean varieties, purple, yellow, and green. The vegetables gave good values both for antioxidant capacity and for phenolics content, with the purple variety being the richest in healthful components. Both the heat treatments affected the antioxidant properties of these vegetables, with boiling that reduced the initial antioxidant capacity till 30% in the yellow variety, having the same trend for total polyphenols, with the major decrement of 43% in the green variety. On the contrary, biogenic amines significantly increased only after boiling in green and yellow variety, while purple variety did not show any changes in biogenic amines after cooking. The steaming method showed being better cooking approach in order to preserve the antioxidant properties of green beans varieties and to maintain the biogenic amines content at the lowest level.

The increased separation efficiency provided by the new technology of column packed with core-shell particles in high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has resulted in their widespread diffusion in several analytical fields: from pharmaceutical, biological, environmental, and toxicological. The present paper presents their most recent applications in food analysis. Their use has proved to be particularly advantageous for the determination of compounds at trace levels or when a large amount of samples must be analyzed fast using reliable and solvent-saving apparatus. The literature hereby described shows how the outstanding performances provided by core-shell particles column on a traditional HPLC instruments are comparable to those obtained with a costly UHPLC instrumentation, making this novel column a promising key tool in food analysis.