Overview of the role of probiotics in health foods and disease prevention

Abstract

In the industrialized world, functional foods have become a part of an everyday diet and are demonstrated to offer potential health benefits beyond the widely accepted nutritional effects. Currently, the most important and frequently used functional food compounds are probiotics and prebiotics, or they are collectively known as ‘synbiotics’. Moreover, with an already healthy image, dairy products appear to be an excellent means for inventing nutritious foods. Such probiotic dairy foods beneficially affect the host by improving survival and implantation of live microbial dietary supplements in the gastrointestinal flora, by selectively stimulating the growth or activating the catabolism of one or a limited number of health-promoting bacteria in the intestinal tract, and by improving the gastrointestinal tract's microbial balance. Probiotics are live microorganisms that live in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and are beneficial for their hosts and prevent certain diseases. In this chapter, after a complete introduction to probiotics, definition, mechanism of action, and their classification, currently used organisms will be discussed in detail. Moreover, different kinds of nutritional synthetic products of probiotics along with their safety and drug interaction will be noticed. This chapter mentions all clinical trial studies that have been done to evaluate probiotic efficacy with a focus on gastrointestinal diseases.