Bioaccessibility of carotenoids from plant and animal foods

Abstract

The frequent consumption of carotenoid‐rich foods has been associated with numerous health benefits, such as the supply of provitamin A. To exert these health benefits, carotenoids need to be efficiently liberated from the food matrix, micellized in the small intestine, taken up by the enterocytes and absorbed into the human blood stream. Enormous efforts have been made to better understand these processes. Because human studies are costly, labor‐intense and time‐consuming, the evaluation of carotenoid liberation and micellization at the laboratory scale using simulated in vitro digestion models has proven to be an important tool for obtaining preliminary results prior to conducting human studies. In particular, the liberation from the food matrix and the intestinal micellization can be mimicked by simulated digestion, yielding an estimate of the so‐called bioaccessibility of a carotenoid. In the present review, we provide an overview of the carotenoid digestion process in vivo, the currently used in vitro digestion models and the outcomes of previous bioaccessibility studies, with a special focus on correlations with concomitantly conducted human studies. Furthermore, we advocate for the on‐going requirement of better standardized digestion protocols and, in addition, we provide suggestions for the complementation of the acquired knowledge and current nutritional recommendations. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry

Extraction and Analysis by HPLC-DAD of Carotenoids in Human Faeces from Spanish Adults

“…However, there was no correlation for others such as β-carotene or α-carotene. This could partly be due to their conversion into retinol in the organism and the different losses and isomerizations resulting from food processing, to different degrees of absorption during digestion [ 22 ] or to the different degradation and isomerization processes they are subject to during digestion [ 23 , 24 , 25 ]. Of all these effects, the most important could be the bioconversion of carotenoids to retinol as there is no correlation between provitamin A carotenoids in dietary intake and faeces but there is correlation in the case of non-provitamin A carotenoids.…”

Coffee (Coffea arabica L.) by-Products as a Source of Carotenoids and Phenolic Compounds—Evaluation of Varieties With Different Peel Color

“…Comparison of chromatograms of genuine and saponified samples showed disappearance of several peaks in the latter, which points out to the presence of some carotenoid esters (Figure 3). This merits further investigation, especially, considering the increased bioavailability of esterified carotenoids over the free forms (Hempel et al, 2017;Schweiggert and Carle, 2017;Chacón-Ordóñez et al, 2019).…”

In vitro bioaccessibility of macular xanthophylls from commercial microalgal powders of Arthrospira platensis and Chlorella pyrenoidosa

“…It has been generally acknowledged that the bioaccessibility of some carotenoids is higher from animal‐based foods than from plant sources (Chacón‐Ordóñez et al., 2018), but data are still insufficient as concerns microalgal sources. Carotenoid release from the structural organizations in which they are embedded in different food matrices represents one of the major factors that affect bioaccessibility.…”