What is the level of microbial activity in your yogurt? Our new tool for studying probiot

Fermented foods can be a good source of probiotics.

For over 13,000 years, people have been fermenting food and beverages, ranging from yogurt and kimchi to beer and kombucha.

Fermentation is a natural process that extends the shelf life of food by converting some of its constituents into more palatable forms through the aid of microbes. It also produces alcohols and acids from carbohydrates.

Probiotics are certain fermented foods that contain live bacteria; they can extend food's shelf life and offer a number of other advantages, such as decreasing cholesterol and fostering a healthy gut microbiota.

As chemists, our group set out to determine how to identify the probiotics that had the highest level of activity within the body. Thus, we created a cardboard sensor that could track probiotics' metabolic activities.

Probiotic health benefits

As they are generally considered safe, probiotics are also one of the most popular dietary supplements in today’s market, accounting for more than US$50 billion per year.

Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium and Saccharomyces are the most common probiotics. For example, food manufacturers use starter cultures of Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus to clot milk and make yogurt.

Probiotics have also been linked to a number of other health benefits, including a possible reduction in blood pressure, a reduction in cholesterol, a reduction in constipation, an improvement in vitamin production, an improvement in calcium absorption, and an immune system boost.

Probiotics, however, can only benefit a host's health when the microbes are living, that is, when they are metabolically active and interacting with the body. Thus, the kind of probiotic, how it's made, and how it's handled all become very crucial