Probiotics, Health Claims and Consumer Needs: Do they Always Overlap?

Copyright: © 2011 Giraffa G. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The term “probiotic” should be used for food that contains an adequate dose of live microbes with a scientifically documented ability to confer a health benefit on the host. Probiotic-containing foods can be categorized as functional foods and are often associated with prebiotics, which are nondigestible carbohydrates that act as food for probiotics. When probiotics and prebiotics are combined, they form a synbiotic. Yoghurt is considered a synbiotic food because it contains live bacteria and the gasoline they need to flourish. Along with prebiotics, probiotics represent the largest segment of the functional food market around the world. Particularly, the market of bio-functional dairy products, including probiotics, has become the corner stone of food innovation in the past few years. And yet, you don’t necessarily need probiotics to be healthy. How the logic can justify this boom? In a recent review, Jens Bleiel [1] explained that food industry is investing in functional foods because consumer insights in society seem to require, among others, healthy food with additional benefits targeted at improving the health and wellness of people. But what is “functional”? Clearly, all foods are functional, as they provide taste, aroma, or nutritive value. Within the last decade, however, the term functional as it applies to food has adopted a different connotation, that of providing an additional physiological benefit beyond that of fulfilling basic nutritional needs. Functional foods contain beneficial properties over and above their normal nutritional value. In this framework, probiotics are actually being functional products. Probiotics are obtained by the action of microorganisms, usually lactic acid bacteria and yeasts, which are useful to assist the gastrointestinal tract by breaking down sugars and carbohydrates to promote good digestion, boost the immune system, and maintain proper intestinal pH.