2024 Volume 38 Issue 3 Pages 145-156
Lifestyle-related diseases, an aging society, and the recent pandemic of a novel coronavirus infection are becoming serious and urgent social problems far beyond our imagination. In our strategic efforts to eliminate or minimize these problems, the role of functional foods as “life-saving foods," which are supposed to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of health, is extremely important. In this paper, to contribute to the efficient development and marketing of functional foods that are truly effective in humans, various dynamics of food components in the small and large intestines, which are fundamentally different in function and environment, and the differences between the intestinal environments of experimental animals and humans are outlined. Subsequently, “human intestinal models" developed by the authors on the above basis and examples of their use are presented. In addition, some improvements need to be made to implement such models in society as trusted tools for evaluating the functionality of food ingredients before human intervention studies are addressed.
