Fermentation-driven degradation of antinutritional factors in plant-based foods

Fermentation is an effective natural strategy for reducing antinutritional factors (ANFs) in plant-based foods. ANFs can limit nutrient bioavailability, impair protein digestibility, and pose health risks. Microbial fermentation degrades ANFs through acidification, enzymatic activity, and microbial metabolism. Beyond detoxification, fermentation enhances nutritional quality by improving mineral bioavailability, enriching amino acid profiles, and generating beneficial bioactive compounds. The efficiency of this process depends on microbial strains, substrate characteristics, and processing conditions, and processing conditions can be enhanced by pre-treatments such as soaking or germination. However, techno-economic assessments show that although strategies such as sourdough-based phytate reduction and solid-state gossypol detoxification have reached commercial viability, many remain at laboratory scale because of challenges in starter culture stability, batch-to-batch consistency, and cost-effective scale-up. Overall, fermentation is a sustainable approach to improving the safety, digestibility, and functional properties of plant-based foods, although further in vivo validation, process standardization, and techno-economic assessments are still needed.