2008 Woodie Awards
Probiotics primer: benefits of eating live microorganisms
By: MCT
Issue date: 3/25/08 Section: Campus
If you buy yogurt, you've likely noticed the recent appearance of yogurt packages saying they contain probiotics that can help your digestion or improve the functioning of your immune system. If you pay attention to business news, you may have heard about a lawsuit filed in January by a California woman asserting that Dannon's probiotics advertising is making false health claims.
The National Institutes of Health Web site has a page on probiotics stating there is "encouraging evidence" that they may be useful in treating diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome, atopic dermatitis, bladder cancer and other diseases.
And you're scratching your head wondering just what a probiotic is.
To answer that and other questions about this emerging medical topic, we spoke to Gary Huffnagle, professor of internal medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School and author of "The Probiotics Revolution" (Bantam Dell, $24).
What are probiotics?
Live microorganisms - almost always bacteria - that when ingested can confer a health benefit. They can be ingested in food, beverages or supplements. There is also a population of probiotic bacteria that naturally lives inside us, and those were ingested when we were infants. You can make the numbers of those go up or down by the food you eat.
Why should people care about these internal bacteria?
What we're learning now, at an extremely furious pace, is that the bacteria that live inside of our body normally function together like an organ. They're that important for our health. There are 100 trillion bacteria that live inside us. That's 10 times more bacterial cells than our cells, so someone joked that we're a minority in our body. This collection of microbes has a very important impact on our digestion, on how our GI tract works, our metabolism, and how our immune system works.
How can bacteria affect our immune system?
The most important way that bacteria affect our immune system is by providing chemical signals that make it slow down once an immune response has been generated. Normally, when you think of an immune response, you think about getting an infection, and then the immune response revs up. But once the infection is gone, the immune response keeps going unless something stops it. That's how you get this widespread problem of chronic inflammatory disease.
The National Institutes of Health Web site has a page on probiotics stating there is "encouraging evidence" that they may be useful in treating diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome, atopic dermatitis, bladder cancer and other diseases.
And you're scratching your head wondering just what a probiotic is.
To answer that and other questions about this emerging medical topic, we spoke to Gary Huffnagle, professor of internal medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School and author of "The Probiotics Revolution" (Bantam Dell, $24).
What are probiotics?
Live microorganisms - almost always bacteria - that when ingested can confer a health benefit. They can be ingested in food, beverages or supplements. There is also a population of probiotic bacteria that naturally lives inside us, and those were ingested when we were infants. You can make the numbers of those go up or down by the food you eat.
Why should people care about these internal bacteria?
What we're learning now, at an extremely furious pace, is that the bacteria that live inside of our body normally function together like an organ. They're that important for our health. There are 100 trillion bacteria that live inside us. That's 10 times more bacterial cells than our cells, so someone joked that we're a minority in our body. This collection of microbes has a very important impact on our digestion, on how our GI tract works, our metabolism, and how our immune system works.
How can bacteria affect our immune system?
The most important way that bacteria affect our immune system is by providing chemical signals that make it slow down once an immune response has been generated. Normally, when you think of an immune response, you think about getting an infection, and then the immune response revs up. But once the infection is gone, the immune response keeps going unless something stops it. That's how you get this widespread problem of chronic inflammatory disease.
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