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| PROEUHEALTH - The
Food, GI-tract Functionality and Human Health Cluster
 Cluster
activities have ended in 2006.
This page will not be updated in the future. |
| Consumer Platform
> EU and MICROFUNCTION |
Functional assessment of
interactions between the human gut microbiota and the host
| Probiotic bacteria are know to have positive effects on
human gastrointestinal health, but the mechanisms of these effects are still not fully
understood. The objective of this project is to determine the efficacy and safety of
probiotics, prebiotics and synbiotics (synbiotics = a combination of probiotics and
prebiotics that support the growth of probiotics), which may depend on the dose of these
components, their proportions in the food product and their interaction with the host. |
The research will produce knowledge on possible biomarkers and indicators of probiotics in
the diet. These indicators and markers are physiological measures that show the efficacy
of probiotics, and they explain how probiotics improve nutritional and health status
through gut flora. Artificial gut models and animal trials will be used to estimate how
the probiotic bacteria influences different parts of gut. Reliable tools to assess the
interaction between host and probiotic bacteria will be developed. The final step is to
carry out studies with human volunteers to investigate the applicability of tools
developed during the project. The aim is to examine the effects of synbiotics on gut
function and biota (biota = all bacteria living in gut) , blood lipids and toxins in
urine. The project will provide tools to assess the efficacy and safety of probiotics in a
reliable way and thus improve consumers' possibilities to imrove their gut health safely
in the future. EU
& MICROFUNCTION web site |
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