In recent years, with the increasing attention paid to the nutrition and functions of food, the demand for visual evaluation technologies for food and its nutritional components has become increasingly urgent. Zebrafish, with its advantages such as small size, fast reproduction rate, high homology with human genes, easy breeding and observation, has been widely applied as an animal model for the visual evaluation of food and its nutritional components. This review systematically discusses the application of zebrafish in the visual functional evaluation of food in multiple fields including cardiovascular protection, liver protection, neuroprotection, regulation of bone development, immune enhancement, anti-inflammatory effect, antioxidant effect, regulation of glucose metabolism, and skin beautification. Meanwhile, it outlines the application of cutting-edge multidisciplinary technologies such as gene editing, high-throughput screening and big data analysis in the functional evaluation of foods using zebrafish, and discusses future prospects for zebrafish in the functional evaluation of food and its nutritional components.