Fucus spiralis is an edible brown seaweed (SW) found in the Portuguese Coast. It has been reported to have high antioxidant activity, which may elicit a potential use for the food industry. However, little information is available on how the SW behaves during the digestive process and how the freeze-drying process might affect the bioaccessibility of the different compounds. Therefore, antioxidant activity, total polyphenols, lipid, and fatty acid contents were measured before and after in vitro simulation of the human digestive process, both in fresh and freeze-dry SW. F. spiralis had a lipid content of 3.49 ± 0.3% of dry weight (DW), which is a usual amount described for this SW genus. The total lipid bioaccessibility was 12.1 ± 0.1%. The major omega-3 fatty acid detected was eicosapentaenoic acid, 7.5 ± 0.1%, with a bioaccessibility percentage of 13.0 ± 1.0%. Four different methods—total phenolic content (TPC), ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC), and 1,1-diphenyl-2-picryl-hydrazyl (DPPH)—were used to assess the antioxidant activity of F. spiralis. The bioaccessibility of the antioxidants studied, ranged between 42.7% and 59.5%, except the bioaccessibility of polyphenols in freeze-dried SW (23.0% ± 1.0%), suggesting that the freeze-drying process reduces the bioaccessibility of these compounds.

About one third of the population worldwide have M. tuberculosis infections, although 90% of infected individuals never develop clinical disease 1,2 . The association between alcohol consumption and TB is well known 3,4 . Individuals who consume alcohol are considered immune-compromised because they have a greater incidence and severity of infectious diseases than abstainers, and are also more susceptible to lung infections such as TB and pneumonia 4 . In fact alcohol users are a group at high risk for TB who should be addressed accordingly with targeted preventative interventions 5,6 . In the present paper, we tried to determine the threshold of alcohol consumption that increased the risk for active TB in men and women.Cases and controls were recruited from primary health care units in the same geographical region. Pregnant or lactating women, and individuals infected with HIV or other immunosuppressive conditions were excluded. Cases were patients with active pulmonary TB (with or without pleural involvement), more than 18 years-old, and diagnosed with TB at outpatient centers in northern Portugal between August 2013 and September 2015. Controls were healthy individuals older than 18 years-old with no suspicion of active TB or history of TB in the participant's household within the previous 5 years.Registered data included daily alcohol consumption over the previous year (including types of beverages and the quantity consumed), age, sex, area of residence, nationality, and current occupation/employment status. The clinical data included co-morbidities (diabetes, chronic kidney disease, rheumatologic diseases, solid and hematologic cancers, lung disease, silicosis, heart and liver conditions, and history of TB) and other risk factors for TB infection (drug abuse, imprisonment, homelessness, or residence in a community shelter). This project was approved by Portugal's Northern Region Health Administration Ethics Committee, and all participants provided written informed consent. We performed separate analyses of men and women in the present study given the fact that the impact of ethanol is different in the two genders 7 . The crude effect of each evaluated variable on TB infection was investigated by simple logistic regression, except for variables associated with very low numbers of TB infections. Variables that were statistically significant were then included in a multiple binary logistic regression model. The selection of the best model was based on the likelihood-ratio test whenever possible, and otherwise on the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). The model discriminability was as the AUROC curve. All statistical analyses were performed with R software (version 2.12.1). The level of significance was set at 0.05.We enrolled 289 subjects in this study, 50.5% of whom were male. The mean age (± SD, range) was 51.6 years-old (± 16.9, range: 19 to 87) for men and 50.9 years-old (± 17.2, range: 19 to 85) for women.

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