Food scientists and technologists have a great deal of interest in adequate control of food digestibility in the human digestive tract. The stomach is one of the major human digestive organs, and gastric digestion is strongly affected by both physical and chemical digestion processes. In vitro gastric digestion models have played important roles owing to superior applicability to various conditions, better reproducibility of experimental data, and basically no ethical restrictions. Our research group developed a gastric digestion simulator (GDS) that simplifies the geometry and function in the human antrum. The original, batch-type GDS (b-GDS) equips with quantitatively simulated gastric peristalsis and enables direct observation of the digestion behaviors of food particles in the gastric contents. A recently developed continuous-type GDS (c-GDS) is capable of secretion of simulated gastric fluid and emptying of gastric digesta in a programmable manner (Fig. 1). This study provides a brief overview of the researches performed using GDS. The history and development of b-GDS and c-GDS are first introduced. We next present in vitro digestibility of representative foods (e.g., Tofu and cooked rices) and food models (e.g., hydrogels) using the b-GDS. The use of b-GDS and c-GDS has provided useful information about complex food digestion behaviors in the stomach, such as the disintegration of food particles driven by physical and chemical processes. Detailed information about the disintegration of solid foods and the release of nutrients from food particles has also been obtained from the GDS studies. Further improvement of our GDS could potentially make it a useful tool for designing novel functional/care foods for which digestibility and release of nutrients and bioactives are well controlled.

Gastric digestion simulator for visualizing and analyzing in vitro digestibility of foods

ACS Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting

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