Editorial: Natural bioactives: a promising avenue for metabolic syndrome therapy

Natural compounds derived from plants, fungi, marine organisms, and food matrices have long been recognised for their biological activity, but their systematic investigation as metabolic health modulators is a recent development. Phenolics, flavonoids, alkaloids, terpenoids, bioactive peptides, and essential fatty acids have each been shown to engage with key nodes of metabolic regulationinsulin sensitivity, lipid turnover, oxidative balance, and inflammatory cascades. What makes this approach particularly compelling is not the potency of any single molecule, but the breadth of their combined action: unlike most pharmaceuticals, natural bioactives tend to act across multiple pathways simultaneously, a property that aligns well with the multi-factorial character of MetS (Abdulghani & Al-Fayyadh, 2024). Nonetheless, the field has struggled with persistent questions regarding compounds bioavailability, their pharmacokinetic predictability, standardisation across sources, and the translation of preclinical promise into clinical evidence. This Research Topic was designed to confront those questions directly.Behind this collection lies a unifying idea: that natural bioactives do not merely ameliorate individual symptoms of MetS but can contribute to the rewiring of the underlying metabolic dysfunction. "Rewiring" is not a word chosen lightly. It implies intervention at the regulatory networks level -gene expression, enzyme activity, receptor sensitivity, cellular energy homeostasis -rather than at the level of isolated biomarkers. The studies gathered here, spanning mechanistic in vitro and in vivo work, systematic reviews, and clinical meta-analyses, collectively support this framing, while also illuminating where the science remains incomplete.A first line of evidence is provided by studies examining dietary and plant-derived bioactives as functional modulators of metabolic health. Khormi