[Postbiotics] Gut Microbiota: Impact of Probiotics, Prebiotics, Synbiotics, Pharmabiotics, and Postbiotics on Human Health

3.3 Pharmabiotics and Postbiotics

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The idea behind postbiotics is to include all bioactive functional molecules that can be used or produced by the microbial community for promoting health. Postbiotics produced by gut microbiota could be metabolites such as SCFAs from carbohydrates, indole from amino acids, gamma-aminobutyric acid from glutamic acid, and polyphenolic acids and other functional compounds derived from the diet. Metabolomics has been suggested as a method to identify postbiotics from biological systems (Klemashevich et al., 2014). Understanding postbiotics will help develop dietary intervention methods and bioactive functional food products to alter dysbiosis in the human gut microbiota. If postbiotics can be identified using metabolomic approaches, foods can either be fortified or processed to include these compounds.

There are several foods that are naturally abundant in postbiotics or their precursors such as acids, vitamins, and polyphenols. Fermented food products such as yogurt, sauerkraut, pickled vegetables, and kombucha are classic postbiotic-rich foods. There are more than 4000 unique flavonoids in nature that can be derived from the diet. Most of these phenolic compounds remain unabsorbed in the gut. Complex interaction between these polyphenols and intestinal microbiota result in microbial transformation products. These products have been shown to repress the growth of pathogenic strains of Clostridium spp. while commensal bacteria were either less or positively affected (Lee et al., 2006). Long-term consumption of tea polyphenols correlated with body weight reduction in obese individuals. Bacteriodetes produce more glycosidases required to metabolize polyphenols giving them a selective advantage over the Firmicutes (Rastmanesh, 2011).

Hence, it has been hypothesized that weight loss may result from restoration of the Firmicutes:Bacteriodetes ratio to that found in healthy counterparts (Rastmanesh, 2011).