Abstract
Strawberries are highly appreciated for their taste, nutritional value and antioxidant compounds, mainly phenolics. Fruit antioxidants derive from achenes and flesh, but achene contribution to the total fruit antioxidant capacity and to the bioaccessibility after intake is still unknown. In this work, the content of total phenolic compounds, flavonoids, anthocyanins and antioxidant capacity (TEAC, FRAP and DPPH) of achenes and flesh were compared in non-digested as well as in gastric and intestinal extracts after in vitro digestion. Results showed that, despite strawberry achenes represent a small fraction of the fruit, their contribution to total fruit antioxidant content was more than 41% and accounted for 81% of antioxidant capacity (TEAC). Achenes have higher quantity and different quality of antioxidants in non-digested and digested extracts. Antioxidant release was higher in the in vitro gastric digested extracts, but digestion conditions did not only affect quantity but quality, resulting in differences in antioxidant capacity and highlighting the importance of simulating physiological-like extraction conditions for assessing fruit antioxidant properties on human health. These results give new insights into the use of strawberry achenes as a source of bioactive compounds to be considered in strawberry breeding programs for improving human health.
Highlights
Strawberries (Fragariaananassa, Duch.) are among the most widely consumed fruits in the world
In the whole fruit, phenolic compounds, flavonoids and anthocyanins are mainly in the flesh, we found that strawberry antioxidant capacity (i.e., FRAP and TEAC assays) was mainly attributable to achenes, suggesting that the amount of antioxidants, but mostly the type, accounts for strawberry reactive oxygen species (ROS) detoxification capacity
In contrast to other reports attributing antioxidant capacity mainly to anthocyanins [52], our results showed that anthocyanins only contribute 54% to TEAC but neither to DPPH nor to FRAP, suggesting that anthocyanins antioxidant activity should be associated to Hydrogen Atom Transfer (HAT) mechanisms
Summary
Strawberries (Fragariaananassa, Duch.) are among the most widely consumed fruits in the world. Strawberry consumption has been associated with health benefits [4,5,6], such as the prevention of inflammation [7], oxidative stress [8,9], cardiovascular diseases [10,11], diabetes [12], cancer [13,14] and obesity [15] These healthy effects have been related with the antioxidant activity of phenolic compounds, mainly ellagitannins [13,14] and anthocyanins [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. A major part of the polyphenols ingested is not absorbed through the gut barrier [30], while anthocyanins are directly and quickly absorbed from the stomach [31,32,33] and from the small intestine [28,34,35]
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