Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is a naturally occurring potential bioactive compound present in plants, microorganisms, animals, and humans. Especially, as a main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, GABA possesses a broad spectrum of promising bioactivities. Thus, functional foods enriched with GABA have been widely sought after by consumers. However, the GABA levels in natural foods are usually low, which cannot meet people’s demand for health effects. With the increasing public awareness on the food securities and naturally occurring processes, using enrichment technologies to elevate the GABA contents in foods instead of exogenous addition can enhance the acceptability of health-conscious consumers. Herein, this review provides a comprehensive insight on the dietary sources, enrichment technologies, processing effects of GABA, and its applications in food industry. Furthermore, the various health benefits of GABA-enriched foods, mainly including neuroprotection, anti-insomnia, anti-depression, anti-hypertensive, anti-diabetes, and anti-inflammatory are also summarized. The main challenges for future research on GABA are related to exploring high GABA producing strains, enhancing the stability of GABA during storage, and developing emerging enrichment technologies without affecting food quality and other active ingredients. A better understanding of GABA may introduce new windows for its application in developing functional foods.

Significance: Muscle wasting and weakness can be observed under either physiological or pathological conditions, which are partly due to an imbalance between autophagy (“self-eating”) and apoptosis (“self-killing”). How microRNAs coordinate autophagy and apoptosis in the metabolic regulation of cell death remains largely unknown. This work identifies miR-378 as a critical component of metabolic checkpoints, which integrates metabolic information into an adaptive response to reduce the propensity of myocytes to undergo apoptosis by enhancing autophagy and suppressing apoptosis via directly targeting phosphoinositide-dependent protein kinase 1 and Caspase 9, respectively. Our study highlights a crucial role of miR-378 in maintaining normal muscle homeostasis by orchestrating autophagy and apoptosis processes and provides a potential therapeutic target to treat myopathies.

With the development of living standards, harmful substances in diet and food safety have seriously endangered people health and life. Advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which formed by Maillard reactions in processed food, have been shown a significantly associated with many chronic diseases, such as nephropathy, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and tumors. In recent years, the research about diet advanced glycation end products (dAGEs) have widespread controversy in academia. The main arguments include the production mechanism of dAGEs, metabolic pathways, and relationships with chronic diseases, especially related to the intestines, gut microbiota, and intestinal disorders. So this review attempts to briefly summarize the dAGE in following aspects, including the influencing factors, metabolism, absorption, and so forth. In addition, the effects of dAGEs on intestinal health and gut microbes were discussed, which can offer a goal for boff in to design low dAGEs products and provided some perspectives for further study with AGEs in the future.

Oat β-glucan supplementation ameliorated DSS-induced colitis concurrently through regulating gut-derived SCFAs and intestinal microbial metabolic profiles.