Humans have been fermenting food and drinks — everything from kimchi and yogurt to beer and kombucha — for more than 13,000 years.
Fermentation – a natural process that uses microorganisms to create alcohols and acids from carbohydrates – can preserve food so it lasts longer, and it can enhance the quality of a food by turning some components into more easily digestible forms.
Some fermented foods that contain live microorganisms are called probiotics, which can increase the shelf life of food and provide a range of additional benefits, like promoting a healthy gut microbiome and lowering cholesterol levels.
We arechemists, and our team wanted to figure out a way to understand which probiotics are the most active in the body. So we developed a cardboard sensor that could monitor the metabolic activity of probiotics.
Probiotic health benefits
As they are generally considered safe, probiotics are also one of the most popular dietary supplements in today’s market, accounting for more than US$50 billion per year.
Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium and Saccharomyces are the most common probiotics. For example, food manufacturers use starter cultures of Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus to clot milk and make yogurt.
Humans have been fermenting food and drinks — everything from kimchi and yogurt to beer and kombucha — for more than 13,000 years.
Fermentation – a natural process that uses microorganisms to create alcohols and acids from carbohydrates – can preserve food so it lasts longer, and it can enhance the quality of a food by turning some components into more easily digestible forms.
Some fermented foods that contain live microorganisms are called probiotics, which can increase the shelf life of food and provide a range of additional benefits, like promoting a healthy gut microbiome and lowering cholesterol levels.
We arechemists, and our team wanted to figure out a way to understand which probiotics are the most active in the body. So we developed a cardboard sensor that could monitor the metabolic activity of probiotics.
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