• Stepanek J

• Fermentation
• Functional Food
• Probiotics / history
• Probiotics / therapeutic use

Fermented foods teeming with beneficial microbes have been a part of man's diet for centuries. The Industrial Age affected that relationship. With the ability to mass produce food came the necessary modifications to the foods themselves: extension of shelf life thru [sic, through] thermal processing and or preservatives to prevent food born illness. As a result, current American diets contain a substantially smaller amount of these symbiotic microbes as compared with amounts consumed in the past. This article will discuss the importance of fermented foods that contain Probiotics and the multiple roles of Probiotics in the human gastrointestinal tract. 

This abstract is reproduced with the permission of the publisher; full text is available by subscription.