Gut effect on phytochemicals

The gut microbiota play an important role for host nutritional, physiological, immunological functions like food digestion, vitamin production, protection of gut integrity, regulation of host immunity, and disease pathogenesis. Dietary phytochemicals are important factors to shape and change the human gut microbiota composition in diversity and abundance context. On the other hand, the microbial community of the gut provides a broad range of enzymes to host which are different from its own resources. This enables human gut microbiota to affect and direct the biosynthesis and metabolism of many bioactive compounds. Bioavailability of phytochemicals is important to benefit from health conferring effects of these compounds. Most of the phytochemicals are not absorbed well by the small intestine and pass through to the gut then gut microbiota acts on the compounds to form different metabolites. Therefore, elucidating the role of human gut microbiota on phytochemical metabolism is essential. This chapter discusses the studies reporting the gut microbial effect on different phytochemicals.