probiotics tagged posts

This is a diagram of human-plant-microbe interactions mediated by plant hormones. Credit: Chanclud and Lacombe

A bowl of salad contains more than vitamins and minerals. Plant matter also includes remnants of the hormones plants produce to control how they grow, age, and manage water intake. Recently, scientists have reported that our GI microbes and cells may respond to these hormones and even produce similar molecules of their own “We know that gut microbiota are involved in human diseases, and that microbes can biosynthesize plant hormones that affect humans, so it makes sense to investigate animal-microbe interactions from the perspective of plants,” says Benoît Lacombe of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

For instance, gut microbes and dietary factors have been ti...

Prebiotics beneficially nourishes the good bacteria already in the large bowel or colon. NB Cooking fruits and vegetables reduces the concentration of prebiotic by significant amounts.

Prebiotic fibers can help to protect beneficial gut bacteria and restore healthy sleep patterns after a stressful event. Probiotics are well known to benefit digestive health, but prebiotics are less well understood. Prebiotics are certain types of non-digestible fibers that probiotic bacteria feed on, such as the fibers found in many plant sources like asparagus, oatmeal, and legumes. Certain bacteria also feed on nonfibers such as the protein lactoferrin, which also acts like a prebiotic and is found in breast milk...

Bacteria that have the potential to abet breast cancer are present in the breasts of cancer patients, while beneficial bacteria are more abundant in healthy breasts, where they may actually be protecting women from cancer. These findings may lead ultimately to the use of probiotics to protect women against breast cancer.

In the study, Reid’s PhD student Camilla Urbaniak obtained breast tissues from 58 women who were undergoing lumpectomies or mastectomies for either benign (13 women) or cancerous (45 women) tumors, as well as from 23 healthy women who had undergone breast reductions or enhancements. They used DNA sequencing to identify bacteria from the tissues, and culturing to confirm that the organisms were alive.

Streptococcus thermophilus

Women with breast cancer had elevated levels ...