What Are Probiotics?

You may have heard the term probiotics on television, the radio or read about it on a pop-up on the Net, but few people realize not just what it is but also why probiotics are so important to continued health. Probiotics, to put it simply is bacteria. In the world of bacteria, you have beneficial bacteria and those that cause harm. Most people are aware of the harmful bacteria. If you have a cut or abrasion, you put an antibiotic on it. Some people use antibacterial hand lotion to kill any bacteria on their hands. If you're ill, you run to the doctor to get medication to kill the bacteria. What they don't know is that bacteria are necessary for a healthy body. That's where the beneficial bacteria enter the picture.

Our media and medical world has made us very aware of the dangers of bacteria. They created the image of bacteria as "the bad guy" waiting to take over your body and fill it with disease. In reality, bacterium can be both beneficial and harmful to the body, depending on the type of bacteria. Without bacteria, we would be up to our elbows in garbage and waste, lack a multitude of nutrients, be overrun by yeast and cease to existent. You cannot live without friendly bacteria. The body contains 10 trillion cells. The intestines, however, have 60 trillion bacteria. The intestinal bacteria help break down the food that you eat to usable nutrients that the body can absorb.

Bacteria are specialized. Each one does a different job and helps produce a variety of nutrients. While you may have more than 60 trillion in your intestines, you may not have all the necessary bacteria for good health. The first scientist to investigate probiotics was Eli Metchnikoff, a Russian scientist and Nobel Prize winner in the late 1800's and early 1900's. He relocated to the Pasteur Institute in Paris where he began his work with beneficial bacteria.

Metchnikoff formulated that many of the diseases come from proteolytic microbes. These produce toxins in the large intestines from the food people eat. Some of the toxic substances are ammonia, phenols and indols produced from the consumption of proteins. He hypothesized that these toxins were the initiators of the aging process. Since the scientific community already knew that milk fermented with lactic-acid stopped these microbes by lowering the pH, he proposed that in order to extend life, seeding the intestines with that same beneficial bacteria should help.

He looked beyond the lab for part of his findings. There was visible proof in the Steppes of his country and in Bulgaria. The peoples of those areas were long-lived and consumed a diet high in lactic-acid fermented milk. He created a sour milk diet and found that it worked to improve his own health. Soon many of the Parisian physicians also prescribed the sour milk diet, particularly for those patients with diarrhea.

While later findings indicated the strain of bacteria recommended by Mechnikoff could not exist in the intestines, the study of beneficial bacteria was now all over the world. In the pre-antibiotic days of WWI, scientists made huge leaps in solving intestinal disorders caused by salmonellosis and other harmful bacteria that was food borne. From those studies came the first probiotic recognizable to many Americans, lactobacillus acidophilus. By the year 1953, Kollath coined the term probiotics as the label for these beneficial bacteria.