Probiotic News

The balance between good and bad bacteria in the gut will effect your overall health.

How much do you now about your intestines? Probably not much, so it should surprise you to learn that, at any one time, you have about one hundred trillion bacteria inside your digestive tract, particularly in your intestines.

These trillions of bacteria are made up of about 500 different species, which began settling into your body from the very first day you were born. The weight of these bacteria is about 1.5 to 2kg

About 85% of these bacteria perform beneficial functions, such as digesting food, protecting against infection, and influencing a few physiological processes in the body. The remainder of the bacteria in the body are sometimes referred to as “bad” bacteria and do not provide any benefits to the body.


At the same time, most of the body’s immune system is housed in the digestive tract, and the gut is home to about 70% to 80% of immune cells. So any changes that occur in the gut have a strong impact, not only on your digestive health, but also on your overall health.  More...

Veteran Terrigal surf life saver Paul Lemmon has etched his name in Australian surf life saving folk lore with a career-best four individual gold medals at the national masters titles. He took out the rescue tube, board, surf race and iron man events in the 40-44 years age group during a day of tough conditions. An absolutely unbelievable effort.  More...

One area of nutrition which has attracted much interest from clinicians, health enthusiasts and sports nutritionists alike is the topic of intestinal microflora: there are claims that including probiotics and prebiotics in your diet can have health and performance boosting effects. Let's look at what probiotics and prebiotics actually are and if there's any truth to these claims.

What are Probiotics and Prebiotics?

Probiotics and have a favourable effect on the population of the 'good' bacteria that reside in our digestive systems. A probiotic may be defined as: 'A preparation or product containing viable, defined micro-organisms in sufficient numbers, which alter the microflora of the host intestine and, by that, exert beneficial health effects on the host' (Schrezenmeier & De Vrese 2001).

In our intestine we have microflora which live in a natural symbiotic relationship with us in our intestines and are essential to good health having a number of positive effects: primarily helping our digestive systems work efficiently. We traditionally view bacteria as being 'bad', whereas in reality there are only a relatively small number of strains which are pathogenic and most microbes are harmless and contribute to good health and well-being (Gibson 2003).  More...

Dr Paul O’Toole, a lecturer at the department of microbiology at University College Cork.is principal Investigator, and leads a new project, entitled, ELDERMET which will study the relationship between diet, gut bacteria and health status in a large number of elderly (>65 years) Irish subjects.

Scientists working on the project note that gut microbes and the impact of the microbiota on bowel diseases have been so far relatively ignored from a clinical perspective.

Dr O’Toole says: “Controlling gut bacteria, for example by dietary modification, offers the prospect of improving health, especially in elderly people.  More...

Scientists from University College Cork, Ireland, have used probiotics successfully to control disease in infected animals to show the benefit of probiotics in preventing or treating human disease.

The results of their tests proved that administering these safe bacteria to an infected animal was as effective as the best available antibiotic therapies in eliminating the infectious agent and resolving the symptoms.

Presenting the work at the Society for General Microbiology meeting in Harrogate April 2, 2009, Dr Colin Hill described how his team had used three animal models of disease that have human counterparts – bovine mastitis, porcine salmonellosis (a gastrointestinal disease) and listeriosis in mice (an often fatal form of food poisoning) – to demonstrate the protective effects of probiotics.

"Rather than use commercially available probiotics, we made our own probiotic preparations containing safe bacteria such as Lactobacillus species newly isolated from human volunteers" said Dr Hill, "In all three animal diseases we observed a positive effect in that the animals were significantly protected against infection".  More...

Studies show that the foreign contents of your stomach plays an important part in weight management, metabolic processes and general well-being. If you have difficulty losing weight, or are obese and suffer from metabolic problems then this could be the key cause.

This month various Australian media outlets broke the story on how having the wrong type of bacteria in your stomach was linked to obesity.

Metabolic syndrome
The news was based on a study done at the Emory University School of Medicine where they had successfully created a mouse lacking the TLR5 signal. TLR5 is required by the stomach to help recognize the different bacteria. This small difference had detrimental effects on the mouse, causing it to develop a 10 percent larger appetite, build insulin resistance, elevated cholesterol and blood pressure levels and eventually become 20 percent heavier than the control mouse. All these problems can be summed up as Metabolic Syndrome, a growing concern in Australia.  More...

Anxiety is not something anyone enjoys dealing with and when you always seem to be affected by it finding a way to help may be necessary. There are many ways you can soothe your anxiety and now probiotices are becoming a good option for this.

You already know that chocolate can do wonders for a dark mood — but…yogurt? If you buy the kind that contains active probiotics, it may indeed brighten your spirits. A new study from Canada demonstrated that probiotics can help modulate anxiety.

The study involved 35 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) who experienced a host of gastrointestinal problems, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and constipation. Participants were divided randomly into two groups, one taking a probiotic, and the other taking a placebo that was identical in taste and appearance but had no probiotics. Results: After two months, the probiotic group had a significant decrease in anxiety symptoms, while the placebo group did not. The probiotic group also showed a significant increase inBifidobacteria, which are beneficial for gastrointestinal health, compared with the placebo group.  More...