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200 Oxidative Stress – Environmental Induction and Dietary Antioxidants

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**Antioxidants** 

**10** 

*Estonia*

**Probiotics and Oxidative Stress** 

Tiiu Kullisaar, Epp Songisepp and Mihkel Zilmer

*University of Tartu, Bio-competence Centre of Healthy Dairy products LCC,* 

A large number of reports about the health benefits of probiotics could be found in the PubMed database. Very little information is available about probiotics possessing physiologically relevant antioxidative properties. Quite scarce is information on the influence of probiotics on human body oxidative stress status and a limited number of clinical trials have been conducted on the effect of antioxidative lactic acid bacteria on human oxidative stressdriven cardiovascular disease-related aspects. In this chapter possibilities of antioxidative

The potential life-lengthening properties of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) were proposed by Metchnikoff already at the beginning of the 20th century. The term "probiotic" is an etymological hybrid derived from Greek and Latin meaning "for life" (Hamilton-Miller et al., 2003). Today probiotics are defined as live microorganisms which, when consumed in appropriate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host (FAO/WHO, 2002). Genera most commonly used as probiotics are *Lactobacillus* and *Bifidobacterium*, but other LAB such as lactococci, streptococci, enterococci as well as propionibacteria, bacilli (e.g. *Bacillus subtilis*) and yeasts (e.g. *Saccharomyces boulardii*) are applied. However, probiotics are usually LAB. Introducing a new probiotic into the market involves a step-wise process in order to obtain a functional and safe product (Saarela et al., 2000; Vankerckhoven et al., 2008). Exact requirements are set for probiotic bacteria. Centuries-long use of LAB in the food industry has proven their safety. Nevertheless, it is compulsory to test the safety of each new potential probiotic. The recommendations include an absence of hemolytic activity and the transferable antibiotic resistance of the selected strain, while safety should be proven in various animal models (FAO/WHO, 2002; Vesterlund et al., 2007; Kõll et al., 2010). There is a necessity for pilot clinical trials on healthy volunteers to exclude the adverse effects of probiotic administration on gut health, biochemical and cellular indices of blood reflecting the proper functions of human organs (Reid, 2005; Rijkers et al., 2010). Probiotics must be able to resist stomach acid, bile and the effects of digestive enzymes. Thus, potential probiotic candidates will be selected mostly from human normal microflora. The ability to survive in the GI tract, adhere to intestinal epithelium and maintain its metabolic activity is directly related to the manifestation of probiotic properties in the human body. Probiotic properties are strictly strain-specific. Even the related microbial species may have very

probiotics to influence on oxidative stress status in human body are discussed.

**1. Introduction** 

**2. Short survey of probiotics** 
