Anais do Simpósio Latino Americano de Ciências de Alimentos
Anais do 14 SLACA - Simpósio Latino Americano de Ciência de Alimentos

Gastric digestion involves physical and chemical processes, which affect food breakdown and nutrient absorption. In vitro digestion studies have been widely used to elucidate the mechanisms of food hydrolyses during digestion. They can be used to evaluate metabolic properties of macronutrients such as lipids. The gastric digestion phase is particularly crucial for digestion of medium-chain fatty acids (MCFA), fatty acids molecules comprised by 8 to 10 carbons, because the stomach also mediates the direct absorption of these components through the gastric mucosa. In this work, the static in vitro digestion protocol [Brodkorb et al., Nature Protocols, 2019] has been applied to investigate the gastric digestion of medium-chain triglycerides (MCT). The total release of free fatty acids (FFA) was measured using a pH-stat device and gas chromatography (GC) was used to obtain FFA profiles. It was observed that approximately 48 % of sample’s FFAs were released during the gastric digestion phase, which is not in accordance with literature, which establishes 20 % of lipolysis in the gastric digestion. However, it is important to notice that medium-chain fatty acids (MCFA) are preferably metabolized by gastric lipase in the stomach digestion phase. In accordance with the MCT composition, GC analyses showed that almost 98 % of FFAs released at the gastric phase are MCFAs, namely, caprylic (50 %), capric (32 %), and lauric acids (15 %). It was noticed that the simulation of the digestion gastric phase it was crucial for determining accurate lipolysis rates in the overall lipid digestion process, particularly when samples rich in MCFA were submitted to digestion protocols.