Food Contamination, Safety Monitoring, and Nutritional Integrity: Emerging Challenges and Solutions for Global Food Systems

Ensuring food safety is essential for developing sustainable, resilient, and nutrition-sensitive food systems. However, food contamination remains a persistent global challenge, as contaminants such as chemical residues, mycotoxins, heavy metals, food adulterants, and processing-induced toxicants pose significant risks to human health and compromise food quality, safety, and nutritional integrity. Beyond their direct toxicological effects, these contaminants can reduce nutrient bioavailability, alter gut microbiota composition, and contribute to adverse metabolic and long-term health outcomes. The burden of these risks disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, including infants and children, pregnant women, older adults, and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. Although food safety, nutrition, and sustainability have traditionally been addressed as separate disciplines, growing evidence highlights their strong interconnections in shaping food system resilience and public health outcomes. Therefore, there is an urgent need to integrate nutritional perspectives into food safety surveillance systems, risk assessment frameworks, regulatory policies, and evidence-based decision-making processes. This Research Topicwelcomes original research articles, systematic reviews, and short communications that address sources and pathways of food contamination, exposure assessment, toxicological and nutritional health impacts, innovative detection and mitigation strategies, food fraud and adulteration, climate change-driven contamination risks, and interdisciplinary approaches that advance the integration of food safety, nutrition, sustainability, and public health.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Effects of food contaminants on nutrient bioavailability, dietary quality, metabolic health, and chronic disease risk• Interactions between dietary contaminants, the gut microbiome, and host nutritional, metabolic, and immune functions• Nutritional and public health implications of food contamination for food security, dietary equity, and vulnerable populations• Impacts of food fraud, adulteration, substitution, and mislabeling on food quality, safety, and nutritional value• Integration of nutritional indicators and health outcomes into food safety monitoring, risk assessment, and regulatory frameworks• Development and evaluation of sustainable detection, mitigation, and decontamination strategies that preserve nutritional integrity• Emerging contamination challenges related to climate change, environmental pressures, and food system transformation Topic editors: Sudharsan Sadhasivam, Di Gong, Solairaj Dhanasekaran Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83148/food-contamination-safety-monitoring-and-nutritional-integrity-emerging-challenges-and-solutions-for-global-food-systems