Publications by authors named "Jose A Rufian-Henares"

Article Synopsis
  • Diet has a significant impact on gut microbiota, highlighting the need for personalized nutrition based on individual dietary habits.
  • The Stance4Health project created the S4H Food Frequency Questionnaire and i-Diet S4H app to evaluate food intake related to gut microbiota.
  • Validation studies showed the S4H-FFQ reliably estimates dietary patterns, correlating well with another validated questionnaire and indicating its potential for enhancing personalized nutrition and health research.
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Black Soldier Fly larvae (BSFL) are a promising and sustainable alternative to obtain proteins. Due to their high growth rate and ability to use different substrates as feeding stocks, BSFL can be also used to valorize food waste. Thus, the aim of this research was to unravel the potential use of Spent Coffee Grounds (SCG) and blood meal alone or mixed as feedstocks for BSFL and the nutritional changes for BSFL meal, especially after simulated human in vitro digestion and fermentation.

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Background: Asthma is a common, multifactorial chronic disease with a major impact on children and adolescents. Exposure to food contaminants is one of the contributing factors to asthma. This study aims to evaluate the intake and exposure of different contaminants and explore their association with childhood asthma.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Antioxidants from food by-products are beneficial for health but are often degraded during digestion, leading to poor gastrointestinal behavior.
  • - The study explores Ca(II)-alginate beads enriched with cowpea extract and biopolymers as a sustainable way to retain these antioxidants, showing that they effectively protect bioactive compounds during digestion.
  • - Results indicate that these alginate-based beads enhance the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), improve gut microbiota modulation, and confirm their potential as prebiotic carriers for bioactive compounds.
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Background: During the processing of spent coffee grounds (SCGs) several residues are obtained, which are mostly disposed of in landfills. There is an urgent need for a comprehensive waste management strategy for these residues. This study evaluates the potential of SCGs as a biofertilizer by assessing their effects on lettuce leaves and the release of antioxidants following in vitro digestion and fermentation.

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During pregnancy, controlling nutrition is crucial for the health of both mother and foetus. While polyphenols have positive health effects, some studies show harmful outcomes during pregnancy. This study evaluated polyphenol intake in a cohort of mother-child pairs and examined its effects on foetal anthropometric parameters.

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Motivation: 16S rRNA gene sequencing is the most frequent approach for the characterization of the human gut microbiota. Despite different efforts in the literature, the inference of functional and metabolic interpretations from 16S rRNA gene sequencing data is still a challenging task. High-quality metabolic reconstructions of the human gut microbiota, such as AGORA and AGREDA, constitute a curated resource to improve functional inference from 16S rRNA data, but they are not typically integrated into standard bioinformatics tools.

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Motivation: Simulating gut microbial dynamics is extremely challenging. Several computational tools, notably the widely used BacArena, enable modeling of dynamic changes in the microbial environment. These methods, however, do not comprehensively account for microbe-microbe stimulant or inhibitory effects or for nutrient-microbe inhibitory effects, typically observed in different compounds present in the daily diet.

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Spent coffee grounds (SCGs) are a food waste with a large generation around the world. However, their utilization as a soil organic amendment is difficult due to their phytotoxic effect. In the present work, the impact of agronomic biofortification on Dutch cucumbers was studied by using different chemically modified SCGs, analyzing their effects on Zn content, the release of antioxidant capacity and the production of short-chain fatty acids after in vitro digestion-fermentation.

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Spent coffee grounds (SCG) are a type of food waste and are produced in abundance around the world. However, their utilization as a soil organic amendment is challenging due to their phytotoxic effect. In the present work, the impact of agronomic biofortification on Dutch cucumbers was investigated using different chemically modified SCG and analyzing their effects on iron contents, their capacity for releasing antioxidants, and the production of short-chain fatty acids after digestion-fermentation.

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Heating and cooking vegetables not only enhances their palatability but also modifies their chemical structure, which in turn might affect their fermentation by resident gut microbes. Three commonly consumed vegetables that are known to undergo chemical browning, also known as Maillard reaction, during cooking - eggplant, garlic, and onion - were each fried, grilled, or roasted. The cooked vegetables were then subjected to an digestion-fermentation process aimed to simulate the passage of food through the human oro-gastro-intestinal tract.

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Article Synopsis
  • A digestion-fermentation model and 16S rRNA gene sequencing were used to analyze how different foods from Mediterranean and Western diets affect gut microbiota.
  • Animal and plant-derived foods influenced the levels of certain bacteria, with fats from animal sources and certain dairy products increasing beneficial bacteria, while some foods also raised the levels of harmful bacteria linked to diseases.
  • Cooking methods like frying and boiling significantly impacted the gut microbiota, with responses varying by food type; this suggests that personalized diets need to consider individual reactions to different cooking methods and foods.
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Almonds are a rich source of beneficial compounds for human health. In this work, we assessed the influence of almond cultivars and harvest time on their morphological (length, width and thickness) and nutritional (ash, moisture, proteins) profiles. We also evaluated the impact of an in vitro digestion and fermentation process on almonds' antioxidant and phenolic content, as well as their support of gut microbiota community and functionality, including the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), lactic and succinic acids.

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The gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem, mainly composed of bacteria, that performs essential functions for the host. Its composition is determined by many factors; however, diet has emerged as a key regulator. Both the Mediterranean (MD) and Japanese (JD) diets have been associated with significant health benefits and are therefore considered healthy dietary patterns.

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Spent coffee grounds (SCG) are wastes generated in high amounts worldwide. Their composition makes them a promising feedstock for biotechnological processes. Here we show that the production of the biosurfactant surfactin by submerged culture of a Bacillus subtilis strain growing on SCG is possible, reaching concentrations up to 8.

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The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of tannins on gut microbiota composition and activity, and to evaluate the use of pectin-microencapsulation of tannins as a potential mode of tannin delivery. Thus, pectin-tannin microcapsules and unencapsulated tannin extracts were digested and fermented, and polyphenol content, antioxidant capacity, microbiota modulation, and short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) production were analyzed. Pectin microcapsules were not able to release their tannin content, keeping it trapped after the digestive process, and are therefore not recommended for tannin delivery.

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Increasing food security is one of the Sustainable Development Goals. One of the main risks in food is the increase in food contaminants. Processing methods, such as the addition of additives or heat treatment, influence contaminant generation and increase their levels in food.

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Melanoidins present important physiological activities, but their structure is largely unknown. The objective of the present work was to reveal the physicochemical characteristics of biscuit melanoidins(BM) prepared under high temperature(HT) and low temperature(LT) conditions (150 °C/25 min-100 °C/80 min respectively). BM were characterised and analysed by differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray and FT-IR.

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There are a plethora of plant species in India, which have been widely used in vegetable dishes, soups, desserts and herbal medicine. In addition to these traditional uses, today there is the extra possibility of also being able to use these plants in the nutritional supplements industry due to their favorable antioxidant and mineral composition. In this sense, thirteen vegetable species-, , , , , , , , , , , var.

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Cereal snacks and meal replacement shakes are gaining popularity as part of a low-calorie diet. However, some concerns have been risen in relation to their nutrient content and industrial processing. Here we analyzed 74 products, including cereal bars, cereal cakes and meal replacement shakes.

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Access to good nutritional health is one of the principal objectives of current society. Several e-services offer dietary advice. However, multifactorial and more individualized nutritional recommendations should be developed to recommend healthy menus according to the specific user's needs.

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Most of the foods we eat undergo a cooking process before they are eaten. During such a process, the non-enzymatic browning occurs, which generates compounds such as furosine, 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) and furfural. These are considered markers of cookedness and can therefore be used as quality indicators.

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Cow's milk allergy (CMA) is the most prevalent food allergy (FA) in infancy and early childhood and can be present with various clinical phenotypes. The significant increase in FA rates recorded in recent decades has been associated with environmental and lifestyle changes that limit microbial exposure in early life and induce changes in gut microbiome composition. Gut microbiome is a diverse community of microbes that colonize the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) and perform beneficial functions for the host.

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The gastrointestinal digestion of food and further gut microbial activity render a myriad of different molecules that could be responsible for the biological activities that are classically assigned to their parent compounds. This has been previously shown for some phytochemicals whose antioxidant capacity was either increased or decreased after being metabolized by gut microbes. Whether a global antioxidant capacity that is extracted from food is determined by the gut microbial community structure is still not well described.

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