The #Probiotic Health Craze is now spreading...
Microorganisms produce important nutrients, influence immune function and digestion, and have other beneficial effects on health.
It has been said that there are 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells in the average human body.1 It has been said, but it’s probably not true.2 Still, there is undoubtedly a large and complex ecology of microorganisms living in and on every individual mammal, and this ecology has multifaceted and important health effects.3 Microorganisms produce important nutrients, influence immune function and digestion, and have other beneficial effects on health.3 Disruption of this ecosystem can have negative health effects, as anyone who has suffered from antibiotic-associated diarrhea can attest!
Our growing understanding of the importance of commensal microorganisms has led to the hope that one day we may be able to deliberately alter the microbial flora of healthy animals as well as veterinary patients in an effort to achieve health effects that are targeted and beneficial. Microorganisms, such as bacteria or yeast, that are administered to prevent or treat disease are known as probiotics, and a very lucrative industry has since emerged to produce and sell these particular organisms.
However, despite well-established basic science showing the importance of the microbial flora to health, it is not a simple matter to produce safe and effective probiotic therapies. Any effective probiotic must be able to survive ingestion and establish itself in the body, and then influence an enormous, complex, and poorly understood microbial ecology in a positive way. One skeptic has likened giving probiotics to planting a putting green in the Amazon rainforest. Inserting a small quantity of a non-native organism into such an ecosystem may very well have little impact. The devil is in the details, and much remains to be learned about probiotic organisms, formulation and dosing, species and individual differences, and other critical factors involved in clinical use of probiotic treatments.
That said, the problem of poor quality control in unregulated supplements also pertains to probiotics. Studies have shown that the majority of veterinary probiotics sampled are mislabeled or do not contain the type and amount of microorganism they are supposed to contain.4-5 Even if particular organisms are useful for specific indications, it cannot be assumed that other probiotic products will be effective or in the same circumstances or that effects seen in clinical studies will then translate across species or indications.