Health Benefits of Bioactive Peptides Derived from Food Proteins

In the last two decades, peptides which are products of enzymatic hydrolysis (hydrolysate) from food proteins have become attention for food experts because these peptides have important biological activities in improving human health. Bioactive peptides have been widely discussed in the scientific community as one of the nutritional groups of concern in the field of food and nutrition. These peptides are termed as " food-derived bioactive peptides”. Bioactive peptides are defined as oligopeptides with a certain amino acid sequence, which contains 2-20 amino acids with a molecular weight of fewer than 6000 Daltons, which have biological activity. The bioactivity of these peptides is determined primarily by the composition and sequence of their amino acids (Castro and Sato, 2015).

Many bioactive peptides with antioxidant, antihypertensive, antimicrobial, mineral binding activity, increased intestinal activity, have been identified from food protein hydrolysate. These peptides are inactive in the parent protein sequence but become active (have biological activity) after being released / cut enzymatically from the parent protein through in vivo (food digestion) and in vitro (food processing) processes. Much literature that reports on peptide bioactivity in vitro and various types of activities have been reported, including antimicrobial, anticarcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, antihypertensive (ACE inhibitory effects), ability to reducing cholesterol, antithrombotic, antioxidant activity, increase absorption/bioavailability of minerals, cyto- or the immunomodulatory the effect, and opioid activity (Malaguti et al, 2014). Some of these peptides are found to be functional, for example, one type of peptide is both an active antioxidant and antihypertensive at the same time.

Some processes involved in protein hydrolysis have been widely studied to determine whether the process produces peptides that have a biological activity or not. Mellander (1950) was the first responsible expert to study the relationship between bioactive peptides that result from the hydrolysis of casein proteins and increased bone calcification in infants suffering from rickets. Based on databases from Bipep and BioPD (Bioactive Peptide Database), states that more than 1200 different bioactive peptides have been found. Data on several types of bioactive peptides derived from food and their amino acid sequences can be seen in Table 1.

Table 1. Health benefits of various bioactive peptides derived from food

             (Hartmann and Meise, 2007).