Do probiotics work? I asked a microbiologist
The importance of the gut microbiome to our overall health is now a huge area of scientific exploration, with research showing it plays a major role.
The Rowett Institute in Aberdeen is one of the UK’s leading research centres in this area and in exploring the link between nutrition and human health. In fact it was one of the research centers to first establish the link between poor diet and ill health.
Today it continues to work on overcoming major diet-related health problems along with developing the next generation of pre and probiotics for improved gut health.
But as we’re about to hear from senior research fellow at the Rowett Institute, microbiologist Professor Alan Walker, there’s no such thing as one-size-fits all solution when it comes to restoring gut health.
And with so many products out there promising to support the gut microbiome, Professor Walker sets out the current reality when it comes to probiotics, what the treatments of the future might look like – and the best thing we can do for our gut health right now.
What’s the current status when it comes to gut health therapeutics?
“The thing I really try and get across to the public is that this area has huge promise, but actually what’s available right now to treat is is actually limited in evidence.
The Rowett Institute
I think we have some way to go as scientists and as a field to develop products that really do work and really will have that benefit.
You can go online and see all sorts of things that tell you this bug does this. Actually, when you really delve into it, the evidence really often isn’t quite there.
Everyone has a unique collection of microbes that’s just theirs. I also think of it as your own fingerprint. It’s unique to you. And so because everyone has a different collection of microbes, what that means is when you and I eat something different we can have a very different response.
And so what that can mean is, you know, if I eat starch, say, for example, and you eat starch, you should not always assume that just because starch gives you a good response, it should happen for me too, because fundamentally that starches interacting with different microbes. So the response is different.”
Should we take probiotics?
“People know the microbiome is important. People know it has an effect on their health, but actually there’s nothing really available that you can take that really has the weight of scientific evidence behind it to show that it really works.
So that vacuum has been filled with all sorts of products. But if you drill down into the data, the vast, vast majority do not actually have proper evidence that they work. “
What is the future of probiotics?
“Most of the microbes that live in our gut are when you expose them to air, they’re dead. There’s not much oxygen inside your gut. And so 99% of the microbes that live in there are very strict anaerobes, and when you put them in the oxygen, they die.
Now when you ask people, ‘name me a gut microbe’, most people will instinctively say something like E.coli or they will say lactobacillus or a probiotic type bug. Now these are less than 1% your microbiota, less than 0.1%. In the case of lactobacillus.
These are tiny components of our microbes. So the things I’m interested in are these dominant anaerobes that make up 99%. And actually we know comparatively much less about what they do.
And I think the untapped potential is there, because, as I say, these are the dominant microbes that are having all these beneficial effects on our health.
If we can somehow work out who’s doing what and harness those as novel, next generation probiotics, instead of giving a bug like a lactobacillus that ends up surrounded 100,000 to 1 by all these other bugs, that, to me, has a greater chance of exerting a beneficial effect on the body.
So for me It’s the disentangling of all this complex microbiota, all these different species, and trying to work out which might be the key players and how we might get those into people as sort of truly beneficial microbes with a weight of evidence behind them to suggest that it really will work.”
That will take time. I’m talking 20 years, I’m not talking five years, unfortunately.”
How can we improve our gut health?
“We know that when we consume fibre, most of that will basically escape digestion by our own body. In the small intestine, we lack the enzymes to break those fibers down and use them ourselves. So they pass into the colon, where they become readily broken down and used by all of the microbes that live in there.
So if we don’t eat fibre, then these microbes essentially don’t get fed with the sort of nutrients that they have evolved to grow and feed on.
For most people that means the general advice to eat lots of different fibre types, feed these gut microbes and in return, take the benefits from those microbes, is generally pretty good advice overall.
I’ve been studying gut microbiota for well over 20 years now, and the only thing I do differently, the only thing I take that is different to before I started, is I eat more fibre. I don’t take any probiotics or anything else.”
