Supplements & functional ingredients
Remember the suffixes: Prebiotics are the food source, probiotics are the eater and postbiotics are the waste.
According to Grandview Market, the global probiotics market size is estimated at $77.12bn in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% from 2023 to 2030. Meanwhile, the global postbiotic supplements market was valued at $10.7m in 2022 and is anticipated to reach $24.3m by 2030. It may sound considerably smaller than its familiar-sounding sibling but take into account that postbiotics are still in their early days of research; if you have not figured out those suffixes yet, it would be a healthy time to learn. To bring everyone up to speed, probiotics are live microorganisms, mostly bacteria but sometimes some fungus as well. Prebiotics, on the other hand, essentially serve as the food for probiotics and are found in foods like garlic and bananas. Humans are not able to digest these prebiotic fibres. Rather, prebiotics are digested and used as food by the probiotics and other gut microbiota in the lower digestive tract.
From waste to wellness By now, you have likely deduced that postbiotics are generated after digestion. They are the metabolites, the by-products or you could even say waste produced during the digestion of prebiotics and fibre-rich compounds by probiotics, in the gut’s resident microbiota. This occurs in the colon, the lower part of the digestive system, during colonic fermentation. Here, non-digestible prebiotic and fibre substances in our food are broken down by gut microbiota, producing beneficial compounds for our health like short-chain fatty acids, certain vitamins (vitamins B and K), amino acids and antimicrobial peptides that prevent the growth and activities of harmful bacteria. “Postbiotics is a really new topic in this sort of family,” describes Senaka Ranadheera, senior lecturer of food processing and preservation at the University of Melbourne, Australia. “I mean, it’s been like 100 years, 110 years or so since the first sort of formal definition of probiotics. Even, in the early, very early ages, people knew that fermentation
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could bring some health benefits.” Renanadheera, a food scientist who has focused his research on probiotics and prebiotic food applications for more than a decade, explains that it is only been with the recent developments of techniques that we have been able to isolate and identify postbiotics and begin to understand their potential uses. So far, it is generally understood that postbiotics are beneficial by-products for us and can even provide the same benefits as probiotics. Critically, however, they can provide these benefits without any side effects that pro and prebiotics can have. “Probiotics are very individual-specific, strain- specific. For example, some probiotics might work really well with my system, but they might not work within you; they’re very individualised,” Ranadheera says. “For certain people, consumption of probiotics can be a bit uncomfortable, not like very detrimental or really critical but things like gas and bloating.” Instead, postbiotics can offer as a beneficial alternative for those who cannot tolerate consuming probiotics and prebiotics, without any known risks.
“It’s been like 100 years, 110 years or so since the first sort of formal definition of probiotics. Even, in the early, very early ages, people knew that fermentation could bring some health benefits.”
Indigestible definitions
One of the well-known benefits of postbiotics is their ability to boost the gut microbiome and support healthy activities, growth and functions of probiotics – in fact, this “health-promoting effect” of postbiotics is the very definition that the International Scientific Association of Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP) uses to define a postbiotic. “So, basically, they react by flourishing the beneficial microorganisms in our system,” adds Renanadheera. This regulation and promotion of
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