Urbanization, emergence, and prominence of diseases and ailments have led to conscious and deliberate consumption of health beneficial foods. Whole grain (WG) cereals are one type of food with an array of nutritionally important and healthy constituents, including carotenoids, inulin, β-glucan, lignans, vitamin E-related compounds, tocols, phytosterols, and phenolic compounds, which are beneficial for human consumption. They not only provide nutrition, but also confer health promoting effects in food, such as anti-carcinogenic, anti-microbial, and antioxidant properties. Fermentation is a viable processing technique to transform whole grains in edible foods since it is an affordable, less complicated technique, which not only transforms whole grains but also increases nutrient bioavailability and positively alters the levels of health-promoting components (particularly antioxidants) in derived whole grain products. This review addresses the impact of fermentation on phenolic compounds and antioxidant activities with most available studies indicating an increase in these health beneficial constituents. Such increases are mostly due to breakdown of the cereal cell wall and subsequent activities of enzymes that lead to the liberation of bound phenolic compounds, which increase antioxidant activities. In addition to the improvement of these valuable constituents, increasing the consumption of fermented whole grain cereals would be vital for the world’s ever-growing population. Concerted efforts and adequate strategic synergy between concerned stakeholders (researchers, food industry, and government/policy makers) are still required in this regard to encourage consumption and dispel negative presumptions about whole grain foods.

Impact of Fermentation on the Phenolic Compounds and Antioxidant Activity of Whole Cereal Grains: A Mini Review.

Bioactive peptides (BPs) are specific protein fragments that exert various beneficial effects on human bodies and ultimately influence health, depending on their structural properties and amino acid composition and sequences. By offering promising solutions to solve diverse health issues, the production, characterization, and applications of food-derived BPs have drawn great interest in the current literature and are of particular interest to the food and pharmaceutical industries. The microbial fermentation of protein from various sources is indubitably a novel way to produce BPs with numerous beneficial health effects. Apart from its lower cost as compared to enzymes, the BPs produced from microbial fermentation can be purified without further hydrolysis. Despite these features, current literature shows dearth of information on the BPs produced from food via microbial fermentation. Hence, there is a strong necessity to explore the BPs obtained from food fermentation for the development of commercial nutraceuticals and functional foods. As such, this review focuses on the production of BPs from different food sources, including the extensively studied milk and milk products, with emphasis on microbial fermentation. The structure-activity (antihypertensive, antioxidant, antimicrobial, opiate-like, anti-inflammatory, anticancer/antiproliferative, antithrombotic, hypolipidemic, hypocholesterolemic, and mineral binding) relationship, potential applications, future development, and challenges of BPs obtained from food fermentation are also discussed.

https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1541-4337.12651

Bioactive peptides from food fermentation: A comprehensive review of their sources, bioactivities, applications, and future development

Structure and immunomodulatory activity of polysaccharides from Fusarium solani DO7 by solid-state fermentation.

The call for health-promoting nutraceuticals and functional foods containing bioactive compounds is growing. Among the great diversity of functional phytochemicals, polyphenols and, more recently, bioactive peptides have stood out as functional compounds. The amount of an ingested nutrient able to reach the bloodstream and exert the biological activity is a critical factor, and is affected by several factors, such as food components and food processing. This can lead to unclaimed interactions and/or reactions between bioactive compounds, which is particularly important for these bioactive compounds, since some polyphenols are widely known for their ability to interact and/or precipitate proteins/peptides. This review focuses on this important topic, addressing how these interactions could affect molecules digestion, absorption, metabolism and (biological)function. At the end, it is evidenced that further research is needed to understand the true effect of polyphenol-bioactive peptide interactions on overall health outcomes.

Bioactive Peptides and Dietary Polyphenols: Two Sides of the Same Coin.

Bioactive peptides (BPs) play key roles in regulating cellular metabolism, and are therefore of special interest to the nutraceutical and pharmaceutical industries Protein digestion is a major rou

New approaches towards the discovery and evaluation of bioactive peptides from natural resources

This study explored a novel strategy to develop solid-state whole-grain oats as a novel carrier of lactic acid bacteria and a nutraceutical supplement rich in ACE inhibitory peptides. Oats were fermented by Lactobacillus plantarum B1-6, Rhizopus oryzae, or a combination of L. plantarum B1-6 and R. oryzae. L. plantarum showed a much better growth performance in oats when it was combined with R. oryzae than when it was cultured alone, as evidenced by an increase in viable cell count to 9.70 log cfu g−1 after 72 h of fermentation. The coinoculated fermented oats (CFO) and the R. oryzae-fermented oats (RFO) were then selected for investigations on protein hydrolysis and on the functional properties of the released bioactive peptides. The results showed that the soluble protein contents changed from 7.05 mg g−1 to 14.43 and 10.21 mg g−1 for CFO and RFO, respectively. However, the degree of hydrolysis and the content of peptides with molecular masses less than 10 000 Da indicated that the CFO proteins can be degraded to a greater degree. As analyzed by electrophoresis and reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography, the protein and peptide profiles of CFO and RFO demonstrated that the proteins from CFO were more obviously hydrolyzed and more small peptides were obtained. In addition, both CFO and RFO presented higher ACE inhibitory activities than unfermented oats, whereas the protein extracts from CFO exerted a lower IC50 value of 0.42 mg protein per mL compared with the protein extracts from the other samples. This research has broadened our knowledge on the development of whole-grain oat products as a probiotic carrier and on the difference between mixed solid-state fermentation (SSF) and fungi SSF in terms of protein degradation and the capacity to release ACE inhibitory peptides. Our approach could be used to obtain probiotic food products and probably to develop oats as a potential therapeutic ingredient targeting hypertension.

Whole-grain oats (Avena sativa L.) as a carrier of lactic acid bacteria and a supplement rich in angiotensin I-converting enzyme inhibitory peptides through solid-state fermentation

Jianzhong Zhou

Papers

Whole-grain oats (Avena sativa L.) as a carrier of lactic acid bacteria and a supplement rich in angiotensin I-converting enzyme inhibitory peptides through solid-state fermentation