We generally associate our digestive tract with nutrition; the part of the body where food is absorbed and from which waste products are excreted. This is of course correct, however there are other equally and in some cases more important functions that our digestive tract is responsible for, and which bacteria including probiotics play a key role in. Continue reading
For a bacterium to be called ‘probiotic’ it must be alive and deliver benefit to the host species, this is a definition set down by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Any bacteria which do not deliver benefit are not probiotic, similarly it is wrong to refer to freeze-dried, deactived bacteria as probiotic. They only become probiotic if they return to life and begin to divide and confer benefit.
An alternative question to the one in the title would be to ask ‘which strains of probiotic bacteria confer most benefit to the host?’ Continue reading
This is an important question with a very different answer depending on whether you are a person using a probiotic, a company making a probiotic or a scientist investigating one. The amount of published research about probiotics has increased ten-fold in the past decade. This has been driven largely by two factors; doctors and academics who see probiotics as a possible solution to various digestive disorders and want to understand more about them, and the functional food or so-called ‘nutraceutical’ industry which wants to support the value of its products.