Preliminary studies of the impact of food components on nutritional properties of nanoparticles

Nowadays consumers have constantly exposed to nanoparticles (NPs) ingestion. Although the impact of NPs on the human has been studied by many authors, they did not consider the influence of food matrix components on bioaccessibility of NPs. This fact has encouraged us to investigate the influence of different food components on NPs. The investigation has been carried out to assess the influence of main food components on the MNPs (metallic nanoparticles) fate during the in vitro gastrointestinal simulation. The experiments have been carried out with the single-particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (SP-ICP-MS) as a tool for quantitative and qualitative analysis and the scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) as a means of qualitative analysis. The influence of various food components on NPs has been confirmed and it may be concluded that the matrix has an impact on the size and form of NPs. The presence of food components significantly changes the behaviour of NPs during simulated gastrointestinal digestion. Possible explanations of the influence of main nutrient groups, i.e. lipids, protein, salts, saccharides and vitamins on NPs have been proposed.