No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

During the last decade, there has been a growing interest in understanding food's digestive fate in order tostrengthen the possible effects of food on human health. Ideally, food digestion should be studied in vivoon humans but this is not always ethically and financially possible. Therefore, simple in vitro digestionmodels mimicking the gastrointestinal tract have been proposed as alternatives to in vivo experiments.Thus, it is no surprise that these models are increasingly used by the scientific community, although theirvarious limitations to fully mirror the complexity of the digestive tract. Therefore, the objective of thisarticle was to call upon the collective experiences of scientists involved in Infogest (an internationalnetwork on food digestion) to review and reflect on the applications of in vitro digestion models, theparameters assessed in such studies and the physiological relevance of the data generated when comparedto in vivo data. The authors provide a comprehensive review in vitro and in vivo digestion studiesinvestigating the digestion of macronutrients (i.e. proteins, lipids and carbohydrates) as well as studies of the bioaccessibility and bioavailability of micronutrients and phytochemicals. The main conclusion is thatevidences show that despite the simplicity of in vitro models they are often very useful in predictingoutcomes of the digestion in vivo. However, this has relies on the complexity of in vitro models and theirtuning towards answering specific questions related to human digestion physiology, which leaves a vastroom for future studies and improvements