Health Benefits of Probiotics

Posted: August 27th, 2021

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Health Benefits of Probiotics

With the recent rise in research on probiotics, significant advances in the selection and classification of specific probiotic cultures are coupled with considerable health benefits concerning consumption. An ecological thought of the intestinal flora is necessary for the understanding of the relevance of probiotic food concept relevance in respect to human health. Therefore, every person has a distinctive signature of approximately1,000 microbial species inside the gastrointestinal tract (GIT).

The beneficial usage of intestinal microflora is colonization resistance. It is a “barrier effect” used by indigenous gut bacteria to maintain the existence of probiotics and further provide niche protection against freshly ingested microbes, such as pathogens (Kechagia et al. 1). Particularly, the intestinal microflora is manipulated to increase its capacity to contain numerous “beneficial bacteria” that affect immune function, metabolism, brain-gut communication, and digestion effectively (Kechagia et al. 2). Probiotics enhance the host microflora and help deter the entrance of pathogens. Additionally, they are recognized to sustain promising outcomes, including enriched gut barrier function, improved ability to contest with pathogenic micro-biota regarding the adhesion to the gut, and developed colonization resistance (Kechagia et al. 3). The benefits of using probiotics are proven scientifically with the rapid increase in their popularity.

Probiotics stimulate, modulate, and regulate the host’s immune response, thus initiating the activation of detailed genes of localized cells. The modulation of the gastrointestinal hormone would trigger the release and regulation of brain behavior via bidirectional neuronal signaling (Kechagia et al. 4). All these functions are a part of the gut-brain axis. Moreover, probiotics continuously induce the intestinal angiogenesis through vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR), which controls both acute and chronic inflammation inside the intestinal mucosal tissue (Kechagia et al. 5). Consequently, they trigger biological functions that significantly enhance the health of the host environment while calibrating the useful microbes for curbing overweight as well as obesity.

Work Cited

Kechagia, Maria, et al. “Health Benefits of Probiotics: A Review.” ISRN Nutrition, vol. 5, no, 1, 2013, pp. 1-5. doi:10.5402/2013/481651.