High Fruit and Vegetable Consumption and Moderate Fat Intake Are Associated with Higher Carotenoid Concentration in Human Plasma Marhuenda-Muñoz, María Bueno Cavanillas, Aurora Bioactive compounds Phytochemicals Dietary fats Mediterranean diet PREDIMED-Plus study Plasma carotenoids Matrix effect absorption Liquid chromatography Mass spectrometry This research was funded by CICYT [AGL2016-75329-R] and CIBEROBN from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, ISCIII from the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, (AEI/FEDER, UE), Generalitat de Catalunya (GC) [2017SGR196]. The PREDIMED-Plus trial was supported by the official Spanish Institutions for funding scientific biomedical research, CIBER Fisiopatología de la Obesidad y Nutrición (CIBERobn) and Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII), through the Fondo de Investigación para la Salud (FIS), which is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (four coordinated Fondo de Investigaciones Sanitarias projects lead by J.S.-S. and J.V., including the following projects: PI13/00673, PI13/00492, PI13/00272, PI13/01123, PI13/00462, PI13/00233, PI13/02184, PI13/00728, PI13/01090, PI13/01056, PI14/01722, PI14/00636, PI14/00618, PI14/00696, PI14/01206, PI14/01919, PI14/00853, PI14/01374, PI14/00972, PI14/00728, PI14/01471, PI16/00473, PI16/00662, PI16/01873, PI16/01094, PI16/00501, PI16/00533, PI16/00381, PI16/00366, PI16/01522, PI16/01120, PI17/00764, PI17/01183, PI17/00855, PI17/01347, PI17/00525, PI17/01827, PI17/00532, PI17/00215, PI17/01441, PI17/00508, PI17/01732, PI17/00926 and PI19/00781), the Especial Action Project entitled Implementación y evaluación de una intervención intensiva sobre la actividad física Cohorte PREDIMED-Plus grant to J.S.-S., European Research Council (Advanced Research Grant 2014–2019, 340918) to M.Á.M.-G., the Recercaixa grant to J.S.-S. (2013ACUP00194), grants from the Consejería de Salud de la Junta de Andalucía (PI0458/2013, PS0358/2016, and PI0137/2018), a grant from the Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2017/017), a SEMERGEN grant, Fundació la Marató de TV3 (PI044003), 2017 SGR 1717 from Generalitat de Catalunya, a CICYT grant provided by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (AGL2016-75329-R), and funds from the European Regional Development Fund (CB06/03). Food companies Hojiblanca (Lucena, Spain) and Patrimonio Comunal Olivarero (Madrid, Spain) donated extra virgin olive oil, and the Almond Board of California (Modesto, CA, USA), American Pistachio Growers (Fresno, CA, USA), and Paramount Farms (Wonderful Company, LLC, Los Angeles, CA, USA) donated nuts. J.K. was supported by the “FOLIUM” program within the FUTURMed project entitled Talent for the medicine within the future from the Fundació Institut d’Investigació Sanitària Illes Balears. This call was co-financed at 50% with charge to the Operational Program FSE 2014-2020 of the Balearic Islands. This work is partially supported by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme to J.S-S. M.M.-M. is supported by the FPU17/00513 grant, J.F.R.d.A. is supported by the FAPESP [2019/11324-8, 2013/07914-8] grants, Á.-H. is supported by the [CD17/00122] grant. We thank all the volunteers for their participation in and the personnel for their contribution to the PREDIMED-Plus trial. M.M.-M. would like to thank Dennis Helsel and Emily P. Laveriano-Santos for their valuable help and support with the statistical treatment of the data, the CCiT UB facility for the LC-MS/MS equipment support, Esperanza Muñoz-Cano for the English advice and Carlos Guimerà-Esteve for the graphical abstract design. Carotenoids are pigments contained mainly in fruit and vegetables (F&V) that have beneficial effects on cardiometabolic health. Due to their lipophilic nature, co-ingestion of fat appears to increase their bioavailability via facilitating transfer to the aqueous micellar phase during digestion. However, the extent to which high fat intake may contribute to increased carotenoid plasma concentrations is still unclear. The objective was to examine the degree to which the consumption of different amounts of both carotenoid-rich foods and fats is associated with plasma carotenoid concentrations within a Mediterranean lifestyle context (subsample from the PREDIMED-Plus study baseline) where consumption of F&V and fat is high. The study population was categorized into four groups according to their self-reported consumption of F&V and fat. Carotenoids were extracted from plasma samples and analyzed by HPLC-UV-VIS-QqQ-MS/MS. Carotenoid systemic concentrations were greater in high consumers of F&V than in low consumers of these foods (+3.04 mu mol/L (95% CI: 0.90, 5.17), p-value = 0.005), but circulating concentrations seemed to decrease when total fat intake was very high (-2.69 mu mol/L (-5.54; 0.16), p-value = 0.064). High consumption of F&V is associated with greater systemic levels of total carotenoids, in particular when fat intake is low-to-moderate rather than very high. 2021-04-22T09:51:48Z 2021-04-22T09:51:48Z 2021-03-17 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Marhuenda-Muñoz, M.; Rinaldi de Alvarenga, J.F.; Hernáez, Á.; Tresserra-Rimbau, A.; Martínez-González, M.Á.; Salas-Salvadó, J.; Corella, D.; Malcampo, M.; Martínez, J.A.; Alonso-Gómez, Á.M.; et al. High Fruit and Vegetable Consumption and Moderate Fat Intake Are Associated with Higher Carotenoid Concentration in Human Plasma. Antioxidants 2021, 10, 473. [https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox10030473] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/68051 10.3390/antiox10030473 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España MDPI