Fucoxantin: A Treasure from the Sea

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 2.3 billion people will be overweight and 700 million obese in 2015. The reasons for this disastrous trend are attributed to the global tendency toward the reduced magnitude of exercise and physical activity and the increased dietary intake of fats, sugars and calories with reduced amount of vitamins and minerals. To prevent life-style-related diseases, like Metabolic Syndrome (MS), researchers’ attention is increasingly focusing on some of the so called “functional foods” which may be useful for their prevention and treatment. One of these functional ingredients is fucoxanthin (FX), a characteristic carotenoid present in edible brown seaweeds, such as Undaria pinnatifida (Wakame), Hijikia fusiformis (Hijiki), Laminaria japonica (Ma-Kombu) and Sargassum fulvellum. The increasing popularity of this molecule is certainly due to its anti-obesity effect, primarily detected by murine studies. These works revealed FX mediated induction of uncoupling protein-1 (UCP-1) in abdominal white adipose tissue (WAT) mitochondria, leading to the oxidation of fatty acids and heat production in WAT. Beyond this important role, in recent studies FX has shown a great antioxidant activity, anti-cancer, anti-diabetic and anti-photoaging properties. The aim of this review is to highlight the main effects of FX on human health.

<b><i>In vitro</i> evaluation of antioxidant activity of methanolic extracts obtained from seaweeds endemic to the coast of Ceará, Brazil

“…The extracts of D. dichotoma, A. multifida, C. cupressoides, and S. vulgare were found to have the highest TPC values (p < 0.05), while the seaweeds C. crenulata and U. fasciata had the lowest ones. High levels of TPC in brown marine algae are expected, considering reports indicating they are rich sources in fucoxanthin (D'Orazio et al, 2012) and phlorotannins (Wang et al, 2012). Similar results were also described by Wang et al (2009) (Vinayak, Sabu, & Chatterji, 2011), whose values were very similar to the methanolic extracts from the brown seaweeds D. dichotoma and S. vulgare analyzed in this study.…”

Can Seaweed Farming Play a Role in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation?

“…A stepwise approach to maximizing the benefits from seaweed aquaculture would include to sequentially extract high-value molecules used in the food, pharma or biotech industries, such as bioactive sulphated polysaccharides, pigments, and antioxidants (D'Orazio et al, 2012;Mak et al, 2014;Herrero and Ibáñez, 2015), and then convert-after extraction of carbohydrates for the hydrocollid industry or for biofuels production-the lowervalue residue to protein concentrates with value in the feed industry (Francavilla et al, 2015;Bikker et al, 2016;Seghetta et al, 2016). Algal biorefineries have evolved from concept and laboratory tests to pilot-scale plants involving a range of seaweed species and environments (e.g., Baghel et al, 2014;Lorbeer et al, 2015;Bikker et al, 2016;Masarin et al, 2016), and may soon become commercial operations.…”

Diversity Investigation of the Seaweeds Growing on the Lebanese Coast

“…Worldwide, there is an increasing importance given to learn more about seaweeds for their diverse biological activities such as antiinflammatory, antimicrobial and anticancer [5,[7][8][9]11,15,[17][18][19][20] and the importance of some species of marine in food diet [9,21,22] as well as their contributionin pharmaceutical, drug development and food processing fields [3,14,20,[23][24][25].…”

“…Seaweeds have become particularly interesting and many studies have been conducted to characterize their contents which have shown great potential in a wide range of biological activities such as antiinflammatory, anticoagulant, anti-obesity, antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antioxidant, antitumoral, antiproliferative [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”