Hello, I'm Monica Reinagel.

Thanks for tuning in to the Nutrition Diva Podcast.

Today we're talking about probiotic foods and whether eating foods with beneficial bacteria

is really an effective way to influence the bacterial population of your gut.

Probiotic foods and supplements are among the fastest growing sectors in the health food marketplace thanks to an explosion of popular and scientific interest in the microbiome.

It's clear that the bacteria that live in and on our bodies

have an enormous impact on our health,

one that we're only just beginning to explore. But commerce isn't

one to wait around for all the data to come in, although we have a long way to go before we understand exactly how to influence

and interact with our microbiota, we're already being bombarded with new products, probiotic powders and juices and teas, fizzy

vegetables, funky soybeans and fermented grains.

Now some of these are traditional foods that have been around for thousands of years of course,

but until about a year or two ago you wouldn't have found them on your grocer's shelf with a barcode,

but all of that has changed.

All of these probiotic foods by definition contain beneficial bacteria,

and the hope is that by eating more of them, we will end up with more of them in our intestines, stocking

the pond as it were.

The problem is, in order to get from our

digestive system, where they'll be bathed in acid and then worked over by enzymes.

How many and which ones survive? That is very much an open question.

Some of the bacteria in our Kimchi or Kumbuka do make it to the intestines alive, but they might be relatively short-lived there.

Even if they don't set up permanent housekeeping, however, these food-based bacteria can have anti-inflammatory

...