Health benefits and bioavailability of marine resources components that contribute to health – what’s new?

Abstract

The strict connection between nutritional intake and health leads to a necessity of understanding the beneficial and protective role of healthy nutrients and foods. The marine environment is a source of a plethora of many organisms with unique properties, extremely rich in bioactive compounds and with remarkable potential for medical, industrial and biotechnological applications. Marine organisms are an extreme valuable source of functional ingredients such as polysaccharides, vitamins, minerals, pigments, enzymes, proteins and peptides, polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), phenolic compounds and other secondary metabolites that prevent or have the potential to treat several diseases given their cardiovascular protective, anti-inflammatory, anti-hypertensive, anti-oxidant, anti-coagulant, anti-proliferative and anti-diabetic activities. This review provides an overview on the current advances regarding health benefits of marine bioactive compounds on several diseases and on human gut microbiota. In addition, it is discussed a crucial factor that is related to the effectiveness of these compounds on human organism namely its real bioavailability.

Keywords:

• Marine organisms
• bioactive compounds
• health benefits
• bioavailability
• algae

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of “Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) através do Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização through the research project VALORMAR: Valorização Integral dos Recursos Marinhos: Potencial, Inovação Tecnológica e Novas Aplicações (POCI-024517-FEDER). We would also like to thank the scientific collaboration under the FCT project UID/Multi/50016/2019 and from FCT/MEC (PIDDAC) - IF/00588/2015.