Static and semi-dynamic in vitro digestion methods: state of the art and recent achievements towards standardization

The need to understand what happens to the food after ingestion and, consequently, the effects that food constituents promote in the human body, has driven the development of in vitro digestion methods (IVD). These methods are simple and easy-to-use tools but still lack both a good correlation with in vivo data and the standardization of existing protocols applied for different compounds. The majority of IVD methods are based on static conditions, although a lot of efforts have been made in the design of semi-dynamic or dynamic systems. In this paper, we present and discuss the most used IVD protocols during the last five years and the accomplishments of the standardization of static and semi-dynamic methods.