Postbiotics Defined

Posted On: June 5, 2017


Ross Pelton, RPh, PhD, CCN explains the newly emerging scientific understanding of the importance of postbiotics

June 5, 2017

Postbiotics, or postbiotic™ metabolites, are compounds that probiotic bacteria make in the gastrointestinal tract. This topic is starting to take on great importance as scientists begin to realize that the postbiotic metabolites produced by probiotic bacteria are critical regulatory compounds that influence and control much of what transpires in the human body.

Powerful gene sequencing technology has revealed that humans have approximately 23,000 genes. However, the common rice plant (Oryza sativa) contains approximately 40,000 genes. The fact that a grain of rice contains more genes than a human was quite puzzling to scientists. How could we humans, as complex and evolved as we are, have fewer genes than a grain of rice? The answer lies in understanding our probiotic bacteria and their postbiotic™ metabolites.

We humans get one copy of each gene from our mother and one copy from our father and as previously mentioned, the DNA in every cell of your body contains approximately 23,000 genes. However, it has been discovered that the bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract contain over 3.3 million unique genes. It is quite amazing to realize that over 99% of the DNA in your body is the DNA of your bacteria! This is why we humans can get by with only 23,000 genes, because the genes contained in our probiotic bacteria are directing much of the work.

In the book The Mind-Gut Connection, author Emeran Mayer, MD states that the bacteria in your intestinal tract use the information stored in their millions of genes to transform the food you ingest into hundreds of thousands of metabolites. We are just in the infancy of learning about the multitude of postbiotic™ metabolites that our probiotic bacteria produce and the many ways these compounds influence and regulate our wellbeing.

Scientists studying probiotics and the human microbiome are starting to realize that our probiotic bacteria, through the production of postbiotic metabolites, are involved either directly or indirectly, in the control and regulation much of our biological activity. This explains why it is so critical to create and maintain a healthy microbiome.  In a future article, I will go into a detailed discussion of the types of postbiotic metabolites that have been discovered thus far, and the metabolic and health processes that they regulate and control.

The newly emerging scientific understanding of the importance of postbiotic metabolites is why we at Essential Formulas believe that Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics® are the best probiotics available. It is the multi-year fermentation process used in the production of Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics® that enables the probiotic bacteria to produce a multitude of postbiotic™ metabolites.

Other companies just provide probiotic bacteria. Each capsule of Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics® delivers A Complete Microbiome System that provides probiotic bacteria, prebiotics foods and a multitude of postbiotic metabolites. That’s why Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics® are able to create Rapid Microbiome Restoration.