Bioactive peptides against inflammatory intestinal disorders and obesity

Bioactive peptides have been recognized as an important category of functional food ingredients, which exert a potential impact on human health beyond their nutritional value. They can exert benefits on different body systems, including the circulatory, nervous, gastrointestinal, and metabolic systems, because of their multiple demonstrated biological activities. Thus, bioactive peptides can act as antihypertensive, antioxidant, antiinflammatory, chemopreventive, antidiabetic, hypocholesterolemic, metal-chelating, and/or antimicrobial agents. Although peptides can be integrated into foods as a functional ingredient, they also can be released from food proteins during their transit through the gastrointestinal tract, exerting their antioxidant, antiinflammatory, and gut modulatory activities at a local level. The present chapter provides an overview of the physiological relevance of food proteins hydrolyzates and peptides in the digestive system and explores the preventive and therapeutic role that they can play in inflammatory intestinal disorders. Moreover, due to the close relationship between obesity and intestinal inflammation, peptides with potential antiobesity activity are also the subject of this chapter. Findings and insights from studies on cell culture and animal models are summarized and discussed, focusing on the main mechanisms of action involved in the beneficial activities of food peptides.