Probiotics and Your Family An interview with Leading Probiotics Expert Dr. Gary Huffnagle

Welcome to the fifth edition of Probiotics: News You Can Use, a quarterly bulletin brought to you by the Dannon Probiotics Center.

Probiotics–living microorganisms that, when consumed in sufficient amounts, can provide health benefits that go beyond basic nutrition - are often taken in through food. Since health and diet are major concerns of families, it's worth exploring what the regular intake of probiotics can offer to every member of a family.

We asked Gary B. Huffnagle, Ph. D., one of the medical community's leading experts on probiotics and health, about the role probiotics can play in the lives of men, women, children and older people.

Dr. Huffnagle is a Professor of Internal Medicine, Microbiology, and Immunology in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich. He is the co-author (with Mairi C. Noverr and Sarah Wernick) of The Probiotics Revolution due out in 2007 from Bantam Books.

As Dr. Huffnagle makes clear, everyone in the family can benefit from including probiotics to his or her diet, and current research is exploring how to make these benefits even more potent in the future.

1. Are you seeing increased usage or professional discussion of probiotics?

Yes, I am. Probiotics have become a very hot research field, and there is a tremendous amount of interest in the research community on the role of our microflora in health and disease. Still, the overall use of probiotics by healthcare professionals and individuals lags behind their potential for helping improve health.

2. Are probiotics important for children? What’s the best way to help children maintain their microflora balance?

Probiotics are even more important for children than for adults, because childhood is the time when the immune system encounters things like microbes, foods, and allergens for the first time. Certain probiotics may help keep immune responses from overreacting and becoming hypersensitive.

3. If I’m middle-aged and generally in good health, how might probiotics benefit me?

The best way is through maintenance of good health. Certain probiotics can help prevent the normal decline of the immune and digestive systems that begins to set in around middle age, and numerous studies have shown that foods containing probiotics can help with overall well-being as you age.

4. How can probiotics help seniors in particular?

Certain probiotics can help improve normal digestive and immune functioning. Both of these are important considerations in the senior population. Studies have shown that regular consumption of certain probiotics has an effect on the severity of cold and flu in seniors. These findings noted that the number of times a senior became sick did not change, but the severity of the outcomes was significantly affected.

5. How has the increased use of antibiotics affected family health? Can probiotics help?

Antibiotics save lives, but they can also have certain side effects when used extensively –everything from acute diarrhea to potentially increasing your chances of developing a chronic inflammatory disease (which is the focus of our current research). Recent studies have definitively concluded that certain probiotics have an effect in antibiotic-associated diarrhea.

In addition, they’re also being studied for use in Clostridium difficile infection that sometimes results following prolonged antibiotic treatment. I would recommend that anyone taking antibiotics discuss with their doctor about including probiotics in their diet.

6. What do you see as the research frontiers for probiotics?

On the clinical side, a new avenue of discovery is optimal dosing. There have been few studies that have really addressed the question: "How much?" Researchers have found doses that worked, but would more work even better?

We also need to learn more about the effects probiotics have on specific members of our bacterial microflora. And on the health education side, we need to bring more health care professionals up to speed about the emerging concept that the balance of microbes in our intestines can play a significant role in our health.

This is such a promising field–we know that probiotics offer a number of important benefits, and now we’re working to expand the way we understand them and refine their use in everyday life.