Digestion of food is a highly complex process, involving a multitude of biochemical reactions, and although it is occurring every day, many open questions remain on how complex food structures are degraded, released from food, and absorbed into the circulation. Food digestion can be studied by conducting in vivo studies in humans or animals, or using in vitro models. In vivo studies are restricted for ethical reasons, are expensive, and sample collection may be difficult. In vitro studies are easy to conduct and allow for running several samples in parallel, but may oversimplify the complex physiological digestion processes. The growing interest in understanding the molecular mechanisms of digestive processes has led to the development and use of many in vitro digestion protocols (Hur, Lim, Decker, & McClements, 2011). Different analytical methods were applied to monitor the degradation processes, making the comparison of experimental and analytical results difficult. The research undertaken during the COST action Infogest Network (http://www. cost-infogest.eu/) was a major step towards improved comparability of in vitro results. The main goals of this network of researchers was establishing a harmonized in vitro digestion method and validating it for its physiological relevance. Specialists from the field of food digestion agreed on a simple static digestion protocol based on physiological data from literature, published in 2014 (Minekus et al., 2014).
