Supplements & functional ingredients More than a gut feeling


Probiotics are widely touted as having myriad biological effects on the body, conferring a variety of health benefits. But while research in this field has progressed hugely over the past 30 years, there are still significant gaps in our knowledge of how they impact the gut microbiome. Elly Earls asks consultant Dr Mary Ellen Sanders whether live microbes are good for us and what the latest research reveals about their complex role in the body.


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n 2008, there was huge excitement in the medical research community about the Human Microbiome Project, a five-year effort to characterise the human microbiome and analyse its role in human health and disease. Sequencing methods had been developed 20 years previously for the Human Genome Project, and with capacity left over, scientists turned their attention to the microbes that colonise various parts of the body. Composed of vast numbers of microorganisms, mostly made up of anaerobic bacteria, the gut microbiome is responsible for multiple functions in bowel movement, digestion of food, and absorption of nutrients.


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A tremendous amount of research was published, cataloguing these complex processes, after which focus turned to trying to compare the microbes present in the guts of healthy people with those in people who had certain diseases or conditions. Two main conclusions were drawn. First, there were many more different types of microbes in the gut than scientists had previously thought. The typical microbiome is comprised of thousands of microbial species and millions to trillions of microbial cells. And second, there was evidence that the microbiome patterns were different in healthy people than they were in those with conditions such as


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