Probiotics

What are probiotics and how do they increase our well-being?

The term “probiotic” derives from Latin and is composed of “pro”, meaning “for” and “bios”, meaning “life”. This implies that the purpose of probiotics is to promote health and maintain well-being.

What exactly are probiotics?

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines probiotics as “live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host”. Roughly speaking, probiotics are bacteria and fungi which do not harm the human body but have a positive effect on its metabolic processes. So, in the strict sense, probiotics are microscopically small living organisms, with the term frequently being applied to food supplements that contain the small organisms and are supposed to introduce them into our intestine so that they can colonize it.

A good probiotic contains bacteria which survive the stomach acid, as the microscopic rescue team cannot work in the stomach. In order to have a positive effect, they need to arrive in the intestine in sufficient quantities and multiply there. The right probiotics can restore an intestinal flora that has become imbalanced.

What is the difference between probiotics and prebiotics?

Prebiotics are, so to speak, the food of the good bacteria i.e. nutrients that serve as food for the probiotic microbes. These are substances that are indigestible to humans and therefore survive their passage through the stomach and small intestine to support the natural function of the large intestine. The great thing about prebiotics is that they only promote the desired bacteria but not the pathogens and unwanted bacteria.

Probiotics, on the other hand, are primarily taken as food supplements and are available in the form of liquid cures or capsules. Since there are hundreds of different bacterial strains, there is almost an infinite number of possibilities for combining probiotics. One thing is paramount: the bacteria must arrive in the intestine alive.

	PREBIOTICS	PROBIOTICS
What’s this?	Dietary fibers indigestible to humans	Living microorganisms
Effect	Stimulate the development of healthy bacteria	Lower the pH value in the intestine through the production of lactic acids
Advantages	Prevent the formation of harmful metabolic products	Stimulate the immune system
Effect on the microbiome	Support the growth of microorganisms Promote the activity of microorganisms	Strengthen the body’s autologous intestinal flora Establish new, healthy cultures in the intestine
Occurrence	Ingredients of the foodstuffs inulin and oligofructose Occur naturally in bulbous plants, asparagus, rye, oats, bananas and garlic	Occur in fermented products e.g. natural yogurt, buttermilk and kefir Particularly effective, optimized dosage in the probiotic food supplements from BIOM.uniq

Probiotic food supplements from BIOM.uniq

Our probiotic dietary supplements are particularly high quality and contain billions of natural, reproductive microbes and are carefully prepared and mixed by BIOMES scientists on the basis of the latest scientific findings.

The high-quality bacterial cultures are produced under the highest quality conditions in Germany. They can be purchased under the brand BIOM.uniq and are recommended on the basis of the analysis of the intestinal flora with the INTEST.pro self-test. There are compositions for the most different needs – because each bacterial strain has its own effect in our intestinal flora. If pre- and probiotics are combined, we speak of synbiotics.

	Conventional probiotic food supplements	Probiotic food supplements from BIOM.uniq
Recipe	Simple standard formulations Lower dosage often causes cultures to grow too fast or too slowly	Based on the results of clinical studies Optimal dosage enables the ideal growth of bacterial cultures
Dosage	A low number of different cultures have a limited effect	“Multi-species formulations” with many different cultures
Capsules	The coating can easily dissolve and does not protect the cultures from gastric acid	The hard cellulose coating protects the live cultures from gastric acid
Range of products	Smaller range	Optimized for various applications
Production	Unclear production conditions	Produced in a certified laboratory
Storage and delivery	Require uninterrupted cold chain	Storage without refrigerator
For vegetarians?	Often contain gelatin	Vegan, free of gluten and lactose
Additions	No additional strengthening	Contain additional important minerals and vitamins