**4. Potential uses of GMP**

Today, one of the objectives of the food industry is the development of novel food products with beneficial properties for health. For its different health benefits, GMP can be used in therapeutic and dietary foods, or as a functional ingredient in various special products, like oral care products.

#### **4.1 Therapeutic and nutritional applications**

 It is crucial to demonstrate that GMP is hypoallergenic to be used in food compositions. In this regard, Takahashi and collaborators patented a food composition that contained GMP and a mixture of free amino acids (leucine, lysine, methionine, cysteine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, tryptophan, arginine, histidine, and glycine) [65]. The composition presented good taste, good absorption and digestion properties, and a high nutritional value. They demonstrated that this composition was hypoallergenic, as after repeated injections of the GMP composition together with an adjuvant used to induce experimental allergy in mice, no antibody against GMP was detected in serum by Ouchterlony. Although this method is not very accurate, GMP hypoallergenicity was later corroborated by Milkkelsen and collaborators using ELISA test to show absence of specific antibodies in mice after being sensitized both systemically or orally with GMP [66].

Due to the particular amino acid composition of GMP, devoid of aromatics amino acids (phenylalanine, tryptophan, and tyrosine), it can be used for special diets of people suffering from phenylketonuria (PKU), being an adequate choice as a source of proteins [67]. On the other hand, GMP has low amount of methionine but high amount of branched chain amino acids (valine and isoleucine), which makes this peptide an excellent candidate to be used for the control of liver diseases, as this type of amino acids are good as caloric sources [68]. There is a patent to use of GMP to improve female's health [69]. The inventors claim that administration of a composition comprising GMP can improve the health of the females. They used murine models fed with GMP composition and showed that females decreased final fat mass and percent body fat, when comparing with females that received a diet based on caseins or free amino acids as source of proteins. In relation to bone characteristics, femur length was larger in GMP administered mice, although only females showed less femoral weakness and greater bone mineral content and density as compared to those fed with amino acids or casein diets, respectively.

### **4.2 Dietary supplementation**

As previously mentioned, research results suggest that GMP has an effect on the feeling of fullness but this does not translate into a lower food intake [27, 28]. For an application in food intake regulation and in potentially body weight management, more work is required. Understanding dose, timing, and delivery mode, including food form and composition, in relation to the pattern of release of CCK, is needed for the use of GMP as appetite suppressant [70].
