**6. Conclusions**

The consumption of plant-based foods, including fruits, seeds, cereals, vegetables, and derived foodstuffs, such as beverages, has been nowadays claimed to be beneficial for human health. This awareness has been shared not only by the scientific community but also by the general public. The increase in the prevalence of non-communicable diseases and particularly the immune reactions to food, prompted the establishment of nutritional recommendations to design functional and sustainable foods. In this framework, PC have a significant potential! However, attention should be paid to PC organoleptic properties, which can compromise the final consumer acceptance.

The potential use of PC on modulation of immune reactions to food has been recently explored. In this context, PC have a double potential, before and after the food intake. From one side, the recently discovered ability of PC to bind to food immunologic proteins, and general food macromolecules such as lipids, proteins or carbohydrates could influence their bioactivities opening a new way to explore the relationship between dietary PC and health outcomes. On the other side, the

modulator effects of PC on enzymatic activity, cellular redox potential, cell signaling transduction pathways or cell proliferation, as well as the ability to bind to cell receptors, that have been demonstrated sets them as potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compounds.

Although significant progress has been made to deepen these interactions with food macromolecules and bioactivities, considerable attention should be paid to the astringency and bitter taste elicited by PC. At the end, no matter how healthy a food is, if it does not appeal to its consumer, it is unlikely to succeed.

Going beyond, constructing food systems to all and designing foods suitable for people with specific nutritional requirements must be a priority. Under this framework, the design of clean label functional foods containing PCs as modulators of immune reactions to food while impact positively the organoleptic and technological properties of food emerge as a new reality.
