Nanoemulsions for food fortification with lipophilic vitamins: Production challenges, stability, and bioavailability

Essential micronutrients, such as lipophilic vitamins are vital for human health and wellbeing. There is a growing demand on consuming vitamin-fortified foods due to the increasing awareness of consumers to common life-treating diseases. People may not take the required daily intake (RDI) amount of these vitamins due to the limited natural sources, malnutrition facts, and loss of their chemical stability during food production, storage, and transportation. Protective encapsulation technologies are required during food fortification to prevent vitamins from degradation and enhance their bioavailability in human gastrointestinal system. Oil-in-water nanoemulsions are described as promising delivery systems by the researchers to encapsulate and stabilize lipophilic vitamins and thus enhance their bioavailability. This review covers the challenges in production methods and factors affecting the stability of lipophilic vitamins and nanoemulsion delivery systems as well and the most recent studies on bioavailability evaluation of vitamins A, D, E encapsulated in oil-in-water nanoemulsions.