Brief History of Probiotics

Dr. Hibberd>> So now without any further ado, we're not going quite back to biblical times... It's okay, this is Elie Metchnikoff, who was born in 1845, died in 1916. A real visionary, won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his work on immunity, and he was the first person who linked regular consumption of lactic acid bacteria in fermented daily products to health and longevity in Bulgarian peasants. He was so excited about this, he actually continued to take fermented milk until he died, but in 1907, he wrote his third book, which was Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies, in which he said, in 1907, more than a hundred years ago, "the dependence of intestinal microbes on the food makes it possible to adopt measures to modify the flora in our bodies and replace harmful microbes with useful microbes." Quite a visionary. And then, nothing happened until 1965, where we start to see the word "probiotic" being used in the literature. It was probably coined as a term probably in the 1950s, but probiotic first meant the substances secreted by one organism which stimulate the growth of another. And then nothing happened. For another nine years. And probiotics then changed to be organisms and substance which contributed to intestinal microbial balance. Then another period of quietness. In 1989, we're getting closer to where we are today with probiotics. Live microbial supplements which beneficially, whatever that means, affect the host animal by improving its microbial balance. And today we live by the 2001 definition which may need some tweaking, in which live micro-organisms administered in adequate amounts, conferring a health benefit on the host, are the definition of probiotics. And some people feel very, very strongly, probiotics must be of human origin, while others are quite willing to consider non-human origin organisms. The common probiotics are well known— they're predominantly the Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, many of them isolated from humans, but they also include yeast, which is not. There is an incredible diversity of probiotics. In fact, it's getting hard to avoid them. And the good news is, if you really want a probiotic, they're in chocolate. If you don't like chocolate, they're in cookies and as well as the more traditional foods, but they're in sauerkraut, in special teas, and most recently in bread. I can't get my brain around the bread because if you cook the bread, how does that work, but whatever. [laughter]