Abstract:Plant essential oils are an excellent source of natural preservatives, antioxidants, and other environmentally friendly additives because of their strong bioactivities, including antibacterial and antioxidant properties. Plant essential oils are volatile and difficult to dissolve in water, which limits their practical uses. These drawbacks are caused by the small molecular weight and high percentage of non-polar structure in the oil. Currently, technical techniques like emulsification and embedding offer research avenues to address the aforementioned issues; nevertheless, the crucial step in resolving the plant essential oil problem is to screen materials with good emulsification, film-forming, and safety during the research phase.It was discovered that macromolecules produced from food, including proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, cellulose, and others, may be able to help plant essential oils with their weak hydrophilicity and volatility. In order to provide references for the development of preservative and antioxidant for plant essential oils, this paper reviews the sources and major active ingredients of plant essential oils, focuses on the emulsification mechanism of food-derived macromolecules on plant essential oils and their applications, and summarizes the issues and future directions of research on the improvement of the stability of plant essential oils by food-derived emulsifiers.
