The Synergistic Interaction between Probiotics and Food Affects Their Beneficial Features

Background: Effectiveness of probiotics is conditioned by several factors. Scarce evidences currently available about the impact of the food in which or with probiotics are delivered on their beneficial features, like the adhesion to human gut. Adhesiveness plays an important role to colonize the gut, especially for specific stage of life. The aim of this work was to investigate whether the in vitro adhesiveness of lactobacilli and bifidobacteria, a mandatory prerequisite of probiotic strains, was enhanced after food matrices fermentation, focusing on weaning stage. Methods: Probiotics were firstly evaluated for their capacity to ferment some complementary food and then for their ability to adhere to human cell lines in culture (HT-29, HT29-MTX and Caco-2) in comparison with the same strains cultured in conventional laboratory medium.