The health benefits imparted by probiotics and prebiotics as well as synbiotics have been the subject of extensive research in the past few decades. These food supplements termed as functional foods have been demonstrated to alter, modify and reinstate the pre-existing intestinal flora. They also facilitate smooth functions of the intestinal environment. Most commonly used probiotic strains are: Bifidobacterium, Lactobacilli, S. boulardii, B. coagulans.
Prebiotics like FOS, GOS, XOS, Inulin; fructans are the most commonly used fibers which when used together with probiotics are termed synbiotics and are able to improve the viability of the probiotics.
Present review focuses on composition and roles of Probiotics, Prebiotics and Synbiotics in human health.
Furthermore, additional health benefits like immune-modulation, cancer prevention, inflammatory bowel disease are also discussed. […]
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Choosing A Good Probiotic
by Vincent Pedre, M.D.
Founder: Pedre Integrative Health
NYC’s Leading Gut Health Expert
Many patients arrive in my office with gut imbalances that manifest in all sorts of ways, including weight gain, chronic inflammatory diseases, fatigue, and skin conditions like eczema. These gut imbalances result from numerous culprits. Chief among them are chronic stress, a high-sugar processed-foods diet, other dietary extremes, certain diseases, and specific gut insults, including unfavorable bacterial infections, parasites, and yeast.
Those problems aren’t as far-reaching as they might seem when you consider how much of your health begins in your gut. An out-of-whack gut can result in allergies, autoimmunity, weight gain, acne, skin rashes, yeast infections, hormonal imbalances, fatigue, depression and even accentuate the way you sense pain.
One way I help restore a patient’s gut to balance is with “probiotics.” The term, derived from Latin, means “for life.”
Among their numerous health benefits, research shows these friendly microorganisms help prevent bowel diseases, improve your immune system, reduce traveler’s diarrhea, help you maintain a healthy weight, heal various skin conditions, improve bloating and other uncomfortable GI symptoms, and even boost your mood, helping to reduce the effects of anxiety and depression. […]
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Human Microbiome Project Highlights
Getting Personal with Bacteria
Microbes, including bacteria, inhabit your body in great numbers and impact many aspects of health and disease such as obesity and Crohn’s disease. Characterizing the genetic diversity of microbes that live in specific areas of the body is key to understanding the composition and dynamics of microbial communities within individuals, in transmission between individuals, and in transmission between individuals and the environment. The ability to characterize microbial diversity and transmission has been hampered in the past by a lack of high-throughput analysis tools. New computational tools being developed through the Common Fund’s Human Microbiome Project (HMP) are accelerating microbiology and biomedical research, and unexpectedly, other fields like forensics.
Dr. Rob Knight, an investigator in the HMP, is developing novel approaches to analyze human microbial communities, and recently contributed to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science on the discovery of “microbial fingerprints”; in a person’s skin. The skin surface harbors a large number of bacteria that are highly diverse and yet personally unique from individual to individual. The bacteria are easily dislodged from the skin and transferred to objects upon contacting. By analyzing the “microbial fingerprint”; of bacteria left on computer equipment, Dr. Knight and colleagues at the University of Colorado found that the fingerprint could be traced to a specific individual with a high degree of certainty even if the objects had not been touched for two weeks. The approach could be important in forensic investigations to provide independent confirmation of forensic results obtained using more traditional methods such as human DNA analysis or fingerprinting. […]
Go to Common Fund at National Institute of Health
Human Microbiome Project Highlights
Microbiome Interagency Working Group Releases Interagency Strategy Plan for Microbiome Research
In 2015, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) of the White House, chartered a committee of sixteen federal agencies that fund research to complete a survey of all federally supported microbiome research over fiscal years 2012-2014. The Fast-Track Action Committee on Mapping the Microbiome (FTAC-MM) analysis included studies of microbial communities and their ecological roles in plants, animals, and humans and in ecosystems like oceans and forests. The FTAC-MM identified an investment of $920M in both intramural and extramural microbiome research over fiscal years 2012-2014; this analysis was published in Nature Microbiology (Stulberg et al. 2016). This analysis motivated the establishment of an interagency committee, the Microbiome Interagency Working Group (MIWG), which is charged with coordination of microbiome research across the federal government. This report, the ‘Interagency Strategic Plan for Microbiome Research’, released April 19, 2018, summarizes each agency’s investments in this field, the range of current coordination activities and plans for future MIWG activities to support the needed resources for advancing this emerging field. The report also includes the representative from each agency who contributed to this report. […]
Queen bees and the microbial fountain of youth
The queen bee, recognized by her larger size and marked with a red dot so the scientists can keep track of her more easily, can live for years, while the worker bee’s lifespan is measured in weeks. Credit: Bob Demers/UANews To the untrained eye beholding a beehive, all animals […]
