Prebiotics and Probiotics: It’s Impact on Host as Internal Healers

Abstract

The regular or continuous use of antibiotics or chemotherapeutic agents to cure disease have led to problems of drug resistance towards various microorganism. The use of prebiotic and probiotic can solve this problem somehow due to their preventative and ecofriendly approaches, particularly in light of new trends toward organic production systems. Probiotics and Prebiotics deal with gastrointestinal lining and improve health benefits of human as well as animals. The components of these should be a part of our foods, or it may be including in our diet to increase health benefits at the nutritional and therapeutic levels. Prebiotics, being indigestible carbohydrates available in thousands of different plant foods, stimulate the beneficial probiotic microorganisms to grow and multiply and help to improve host intestinal probiotic balance. Probiotics are a diverse group of living organism having non-pathologic bacteria that are functionally beneficial for improving health due to their ability to prevent inflammation that takes place in intestine. Action mechanism of both these in relation to each other as well as their intestinal interactions has been discussed. The beneficial effects include disease treatment and prevention as well as improvement of digestion and absorption in the host. The alarming increase in inappropriate use of antibiotics and development of bacterial resistance makes prebiotic & probiotics a very interesting field for research. In the present scenario, both have shown a number of beneficial effects in a variety of disease related to gastrointestinal as well as non-gastrointestinal such as colon cancer, ulceration in intestine.