Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Antinutrient
Summary
Antinutrients are natural or synthetic compounds that interfere with the absorption of nutrients. Nutrition studies focus on antinutrients commonly found in food sources and beverages. Antinutrients may take the form of drugs, chemicals that naturally occur in food sources, proteins, or overconsumption of nutrients themselves. Antinutrients may act by binding to vitamins and minerals, preventing their uptake, or inhibiting enzymes.
Throughout history, humans have bred crops to reduce antinutrients, and cooking processes have developed to remove them from raw food materials and increase nutrient bioavailability, notably in staple foods such as cassava.
Phytic acid has a strong binding affinity to minerals such as calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, and zinc. This results in precipitation, making the minerals unavailable for absorption in the intestines. Phytic acids are common in the hulls of nuts, seeds, and grains and of great importance in agriculture, animal nutrition, and in eutrophication, due to the mineral chelation and bound phosphates released into the environment. Without the need to use milling to reduce phytate (including nutrient), the amount of phytic acid is commonly reduced in animal feeds by adding histidine acid phosphate type of phytases to them.
Oxalic acid and oxalates are present in many plants and in significant amounts particularly in rhubarb, tea, spinach, parsley, and purslane. Oxalates bind to calcium and prevent its absorption in the human body.
Glucosinolates prevent the uptake of iodine, affecting the function of the thyroid and thus are considered goitrogens. They are found in plants such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, mustard greens, radishes, and cauliflower.
Protease inhibitors are substances that inhibit the actions of trypsin, pepsin, and other proteases in the gut, preventing the digestion and subsequent absorption of protein. For example, Bowman–Birk trypsin inhibitor is found in soybeans. Some trypsin inhibitors and lectins are found in legumes and interfere with digestion.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.