Ndergoes the greatest decrease in the course of alkanization. Roasting can also be a vital step that impacts polyphenols, specially flavonoids and catechins; its high temperatures for long periods translate into a bitter taste that final results in the formation of insoluble compounds amongst flavonoids and proteins, peptides, polysaccharides and products with the Maillard reaction [16, 17, 18]. Further, roasting also promotes the epimerization of (-)-epicatechin to (-catechin [19]. Despite the fact that the elements talked about above lower the polyphenol content material in cocoa and its derivatives, other research have demonstrated that, even below these circumstances, with a low content of total polyphenols, they have a protective effect as a consequence of their functional property of antioxidant capacity [20, 21, 22]. Moreover, food synergy may very well be responsible for the biological potential of cocoa derivatives, despite being subjected to chemical and physical IRAK4 Inhibitor Source transformations that lead to said lower in polyphenols [23]. Nonetheless, demonstrating the effectiveness in the antioxidant capacity of some foods or raw materials (for example cocoa and its derivates) on the health of people who consume them needs a lot more advanced studies that go beyond reporting the total polyphenol content material within the meals. This is simply because among the greatest limitations of plant-based bioactive compounds (e.g., polyphenols) to produce health-related benefits would be the complex mechanism that regulates their bioaccessibility and bioavailability [24, 25]. Evidence has shown that the interaction of cocoa and its derivatives with other xenobiotics and the meals matrix, host-related aspects (which include genetic polymorphisms in xenobiotic-metabolizing enzymes), and also the interplay together with the intestinal microbiota are straight involved in their bioaccessibility and bioavailability. Likewise, it has been determined that polyphenols present low bioaccessibility and bioavailability as about 50 are absorbed in the small intestine as well as the remaining portion is subjected to biotransformation by gut microbiota, making bioactive metabolites [25]. Hence, this literature review covers the last decade of findings about the in vitro and in vivo effects of polyphenols identified in cocoa and its derivatives inside the context of their biological antioxidant possible. Additional, we report the range of concentration of total polyphenols and antioxidant capacity in postharvest and industrialization steps, which serves as a framework for future research as well as the improvement of cocoa and its derivatives with functional traits. two. Approaches This literature overview was performed ERK5 Inhibitor web utilizing probably the most extensive databases in the fields of biomedicine and chemistry: Science Direct, Springer, Taylor Francis, Scopus and MDPI. We restricted the search to articles published between 2010 and 2020 and utilised the following search equation to discover research that integrated these terms inside the title and also the abstract: cocoa AND antioxidant AND health AND polyphenols. These criteria have been selected to locate research about distinct concentrations of polyphenols in cocoa and its derivatives brought on by postharvest and transformation processes, and how polyphenols influence overall health. This search resulted within a list of study papers regarding the antioxidant capacity of polyphenols, both in vitro and in vivo. The papers on combinations of different extracts and purified compounds from cocoa, too as mixtures with other plants, were outside the scope of this overview. Subsequently, we con.