Gut Effect on Phytochemicals

Gut Effect on Phytochemicals

Fatma Cebeci
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-5129-8.ch006
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Abstract

The gut microbiota play an important role for host nutritional, physiological, immunological functions like food digestion, vitamin production, protection of gut integrity, regulation of host immunity, and disease pathogenesis. Dietary phytochemicals are important factors to shape and change the human gut microbiota composition in diversity and abundance context. On the other hand, the microbial community of the gut provides a broad range of enzymes to host which are different from its own resources. This enables human gut microbiota to affect and direct the biosynthesis and metabolism of many bioactive compounds. Bioavailability of phytochemicals is important to benefit from health conferring effects of these compounds. Most of the phytochemicals are not absorbed well by the small intestine and pass through to the gut then gut microbiota acts on the compounds to form different metabolites. Therefore, elucidating the role of human gut microbiota on phytochemical metabolism is essential. This chapter discusses the studies reporting the gut microbial effect on different phytochemicals.
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Gut Effect On Phytochemicals

There are various types of phytochemicals such as phenolic acids, flavonoids, stilbenes, ellagitannins, proanthocyanidins, vitamins, peptides and glucosinolates. Gut microbiota can take role in sythesis of vitamins (notably vitamin K and B group vitamins) or metabolise these phytochemicals to form metabolites (Rowland et al., 2018). For instance, five Bifidobacteria species are related with hydrolysis of soymilk isoflavones (Tsangalis et al., 2002) and gut bacterial species belonging to the genera Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus were reported to be involved in phenolic acid metabolism in the gut (Couteau et al., 2001). In some cases, the hydrolysis reactions might result in the formation of more bioactive compounds than the parent compounds (Lampe & Chang, 2007). Moreover, there are inter-individual differences in metabolism of these phytochemicals due to gut microbiota profile (Lampe & Chang, 2007; Liu et al., 2020). As a result, it is important to understand the metabolism of phytochemicals by human gut microbiota to maximize health benefits. Here, biotransformation of different phytochemicals by gut microbiota are discussed.

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