**4. Nutritional composition and consumption of tropical oilseeds**

The oilseeds have great potentials in human nutritional requirements in diets due to its array of proteins, minerals and oils (essential and non essential oils) with huge functional benefits. The nutritional composition of each oilseed, and amino profile differ according to the maturity, type, variety, specie, breeding condition, environment as well as the management objectives [11–13]. It has been reported that oilseeds are currently used essentially for oil extraction for vegetable oils whose characteristic quality is dependent on the composition of the fatty acids. Researchers [14, 15] have identified ome-6 fatty acids in corn, nuts, soybean, safflower, sunflower, among other oilseeds, which have scientifically proven to impact human health and prevent cardiovascular ailments. Apart from human uses, wastes from oilseeds called meals or press-cakes could be utilized for the production of animal feeds. In the traditional society, oilseeds are mainly consumed as intact food grains, or processed into cakes, e.g. groundnut cakes, chifko, etc. [16] (**Table 1**).

The nutritional composition of oilseeds ex-rays the different compositional values of oilseeds in terms of the proximate, fatty acid, amino acid profile, vitamin, steroids, and mineral contents; including such properties of the oils like melting point, refractive index, iodine value, peroxide value, *p*-anisidine value, acid value, saponification value, and the oxidative stability of the oils (**Table 2**, **Figure 3**).

Increased demand for oilseed crops both for domestic and industrial applications has increased recently partly due to the functional roles played by the oilseed, livestock needs and in part, due to population increase and processing needs [18]. According to World Population Review [19], the current world population of estimate as of 2019 is 7.9 billion and is projected to reach about 9.9 billion in 2050. To meet the demand of the growing population, high yielding varieties are been produced through genetic engineering, especially in the area of soybean and oil palm seedlings, not only for the oils they supplies, but also for their cake [20]. Although temperate regions constitutes the major oilseed producers, the tropical regions such as parts of USA, Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, among other countries contributes about 6% of


