Bioactive peptides from milk and dairy proteins: models of digestion and intestinal barrier

Milk and dairy products contain many bioactive components that have been reported to have health benefits. Bioactive peptides are generally defined as short chains of amino acid monomers that have recognized beneficial effects on human health. Even though, long-term clinical trials are the gold standard to assess their efficacy, emerging in vitro and ex vivo systems to study digestion/extraction, absorption, and bioactivity must be developed and standardized rendering them applicable from laboratory scale to industrial scale. This chapter describes the relevant in vitro and ex vivo models available in the scientific literature to study the bioefficacy of bioactive peptides from milk and dairy proteins. The development of novel approaches and models to assess the bioactivity of milk and dairy proteins will increase the predictive power of the in vitro available models. The recent developments of noninvasive methods to follow digestive parameters and to assess the bioactivity of milk and dairy proteins open new avenues nutritional research.