At this point, gut health has been the topic of conversation  in the wellness world for a while, and with good reason. We all know about drinking kombucha, the gut-brain connection and the importance of probiotics. However, there is a topic that’s creating an even bigger buzz  than probiotics in the land of gut health at the moment: postbiotics.

Related to prebiotics and probiotics, postbiotics are essentially the endgame goal of all your gut health efforts. You might not realise it, but when you take prebiotics or probiotics, the hope is that, from that, postbiotics will be produced. The entire point is postbiotics,” says gastroenterologist Will Bulsiewicz, MD, author of the book, Fiber Fueled.

So why should we care about the latest and greatest “biotic” compound to come up in the wellness world? 

The following article was adjusted from the original written by Emily Larence for the websit wellandgood.com. Follow wellandgood.com by clicking the following link: https://www.wellandgood.com/food-nutrition/

What are Postbiotics and how are they different from Pre- and Probiotics?

Probiotics, Dr. Bulsiewicz says, are live microoraganisms (typically bacteria or yeast) that benefit the body by boosting the immune system, reducing inflammation, helping with digestion, and improving mood. They live in your gut, but there are also foods that contain probiotics, such as yogurt, pickled veggies, and miso. (You can obviously also find them in supplement form.)

Postbiotics are byproducts of the fermentation process carried out by probiotics in the intestine. In other words, as probiotics feed on prebiotics, postbiotics are produced. They are basically the “waste” of probiotics. Additionally, postbiotics can be produced and extracted in laboratories to be used for therapeutic purposes, and delivered through pills and direct application (10).

Waste products don’t sound like they would be of much use to us. Interestingly however, they are responsible for multiple important health-boosting functions in your gut. Some examples of postbiotics include organic acids, bacteriocins, carbonic substances and enzymes. They result naturally from the existence and survival of microorganisms living in our gut, though they can also be added directly through therapeutic processes (10).

Gut health in a nutshell: Postbiotics = Prebiotics + Probiotics

“The thing to know about probiotics is that they don’t stick around. They don’t colonize the gut permanently,” Dr. Bulsiewicz says. This is where postbiotics come in. This is a relatively new term (hence why you may not have heard it before!) used to describe “functional bioactive compounds, generated in a matrix during fermentation, which may be used to promote health.” The translation of this International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS) article definition: Postbiotics are essentially the byproducts of probiotics. They eat food, it ferments, and voilà, you have postbiotics.

1. Postbiotics can help heal leaky gut

Even if you aren’t familiar with the term leaky gut, you might be familiar with its symptoms. Known in the medical world as “increased intestinal permeability,” leaky gut is when the walls of the digestive tract become permeable, which can trigger inflammation in the body. Dr. Bulsiewicz says one postbiotic, butyrate, can help reverse the effects. “Butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid, which is produced when you consume soluble fiber. That soluble fiber gets metabolized and consumed by the healthy bacteria inside of you to produce butyrate. Then, butyrate helps heal your colon,” he says.

2. Postbiotics may help lower inflammation

According to one study published in the journal Clinics in Perinatology, pre- pro- and postbiotics are all connected to lowering inflammation throughout the body by helping to restore the good bacteria population in the gut. (It should be noted that this specific study focused on these compounds for helping prevent or treat an intestinal disease common in prenatal babies, so take these findings with a grain of salt.)

3. They may help boost the immune system

One study found a connection between postbiotics and a stronger immune system, particularly in infants. This is not too surprising as, after all, a direct link between gut health and immunity has long been established.

4. Postbiotics may help prevent type 2 diabetes

Postbiotics (specifically Muramyl dipeptide, a type of peptide created by probiotics) have also been found to be successful in preventing diabetes, at least in mice. Researchers explain that having gut bacteria chronically out of balance can contribute to someone becoming insulin resistance, and pre-diabetic. Postbiotics, meanwhile, appear to help insulin work more effectively, bringing balance and stopping the development of diabetes.

How can I ensure I’m producing or getting enough postbiotics?

Again, maximizing your postbiotics requires feeding your body’s probiotics with a variety of prebiotics. How to do that, you ask? By eating more fiber, aka the best source of prebiotics there is.

You can get prebiotics from both soluble (the kind that absorbs water) and insoluble (the kind that pushes things through your system) fiber. But Dr. Bulsiewicz says you don’t need to stress about hitting a specific quota of each kind into your daily diet. “For simplicity’s sake, fiber is often broken into these two main groups, but the truth is, we don’t have a good estimate on how many [different] types of fiber sources there are,” he says. “The key, from my perspective, is to eat a diverse mix of plants that will bring a unique mix of fiber, both soluble and insoluble,” he says.

In other words: Eat lots of plants and the prebiotic + probiotic = postbiotic formula will start taking place in your body. And when that happens, you’re gearing yourself up to reap loads of potential health benefits. Plus, eating lots of fiber itself is good for more than just postbiotic production—you’re gearing yourself up for a healthier gut, better digestion (and less constipation), potentially lower cholesterol, and other benefits.

 The following foods can also help increase the concentration of postbiotics in your gut:

• Yogurt
• Sauerkraut
• Miso soup
• Kefir
• Sourdough bread
• Buttermilk
• Pickles
• Tempeh

Conclusion

You will likely be hearing more and more about postbiotics over the next several months and years and although there is still a lot to learn postbiotics are likely to be the next up-and-coming health-boosting component in your diet and digestive process. But the major takeaway is this: Taking care of your gut is the gift that keeps on giving and is even more beneficial than we may know. As if we needed another reason to eat more plants.

Many people don’t get enough nutrients from the diet alone (1Trusted Source). Currently, over half of the US population takes synthetic nutrients like multivitamins (2Trusted Source). However, there has been much debate over whether synthetic nutrients provide the same benefits as natural nutrients. Some sources even suggest that synthetic nutrients may be dangerous. This article takes an objective look at the science on synthetic and natural nutrients.

What Are Synthetic and Natural Nutrients?

Here’s the difference between natural and synthetic nutrients:

• Natural nutrients: These are obtained from whole food sources in the diet.
• Synthetic nutrients: Also referred to as isolated nutrients, these are usually made artificially, in an industrial process.

Synthetic nutrients do not include “whole food supplements,” which are made from concentrated, dehydrated whole foods. The majority of supplements available on the market today are made artificially. These include vitamins, antioxidants, minerals and amino acids, among others. They can be taken in pill, capsule, tablet, powder or liquid form, and are made to mimic the way natural nutrients act in our bodies.

To figure out if your supplement is synthetic or natural, check the label. Natural supplements usually list food sources or are labeled as 100% plant or animal-based. Supplements that list nutrients individually, such as vitamin C, or use chemical names like ascorbic acid, are almost certainly synthetic.

Bottom Line

Synthetic nutrients are dietary supplements made artificially in a laboratory setting or industrial process. Natural nutrients are those found in whole foods.

Are Natural and Synthetic Nutrients Different?

Bottom Line:

It is unclear how well synthetic nutrients are absorbed and used in the body. Your body will use nutrients best when taken in whole food form, with a wide variety of food compounds.

Nutrients in Whole Foods Have Health Benefits

Bottom Line:

Evidence supports the idea that natural nutrients found in whole foods can prevent against a wide range of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and premature death.

Supplement Studies Have Provided Mixed Results

Bottom Line:

Studies about the beneficial health effects of many synthetic nutrients have been inconsistent, weak or shown no effect.

Should You Take Synthetic Nutrients?

Bottom Line:

For certain groups of people at risk of nutritional deficiencies, certain synthetic supplements can be beneficial.

Synthetic Nutrients May Be Downright Harmful

Bottom line:

Taking large amounts of synthetic nutrients can have harmful health effects. Recommended daily doses are safe for most people, but caution is advised.

A Primer on B12

Vitamin B12 — also called cobalamin — is a priority for vegans and vegetarians to address because, the human body cannot synthesise B12 and plant foods don’t contain it unless they’re fortified with B12. That’s why vitamin B12 is usually sourced from animal foods such as liver, fish, chicken and eggs.

Vitamin B12 helps the body to synthesise new DNA and maintain healthy red blood cells and neurons. Vitamin B12 deficiency, therefore, leads to a plethora of side effects including tiredness, anaemia, constipation, weight loss, memory problems, depression, tingling in hands and feet and other manifestations of neurological issues.

The following article was originally written by Sin Jie Yong (shinjieyong@gmail.com), freelance medical writer and published academic author for medium.com.

B12-Synthesizing Gut Bacteria

“Vitamin B12, otherwise known as cobalamin, is the biggest and most intricate vitamin,” write Chinese researchers in a peer-reviewed book chapter titled ‘Biosynthesis of Vitamins by Probiotic Bacteria’. Why? Vitamin B12 has the most complex structure out of all vitamins synthesisable by gut bacteria. Vitamin B12 synthesis requires 30 different genes in a bacterial genome to be activated in an intricate order.

In a 2019 review written by Japanese researchers in the Frontiers of Nutrition, they provided a list of gut bacteria that can make vitamin B12:

• Bacteroidetes: Bacteroides fragilis and Prevotella copri.
• Firmicutes: Clostridium difficile, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, Ruminococcus lactaris, Lactobacillus plantarum, L. coryniformis and L. reuteri.
• Actinobacteria: Bifidobacterium animalis, B. infantis and B.longum.
• Fusobacteria: Fusobacterium varium.

But these bacteria all reside in the large intestine or the colon. And receptors that uptake vitamin B12 are only present in the small intestine wherein they absorb dietary B12 after protein digestion in the stomach. The gut microbial B12 is, therefore, not bioavailable to the host.

What About Coprophagy?

Some mammals such as rabbits, hippos, pandas, elephants and non-human primates practice coprophagy, the act of ingesting faeces, when they have a shortage of vitamin B12.

“These animals receive the benefit of microbial cobalamin [vitamin B12] production in the large intestine by consuming their faeces which localizes microbial cobalamin (and other vitamins) to the upper part of the digestive tract where it can be absorbed,” Andrew Goodman, assistant professor in the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis at Yale University and colleagues wrote in Cell Metabolism.

However, even animals prefer B12 from foods if given a choice. Experiments with rodents and dogs showed that they tend to engage in coprophagy if their diet were deficient in B12. Provide them meals with B12, and the coprophagy tendency stops.

No credible studies to date have tried administering something like a ‘stool capsule’ to people deficient in vitamin B12 as most  people settle for other nutritional supplements or, for vegans and vegetarians, other non-animal sources of B12 such as algae or B12-fortified plant foods. 

What About B12-Synthesizing Small Intestinal Bacteria?

“The human small intestine also often harbours a considerable microflora,” stated an old 1980 study which examined healthy Southern Indians. “We now show that at least two groups of organisms in the small bowel, Pseudomonas and Klebsiella species may synthesize significant amounts of the B12 vitamin.”

Yet vitamin B12 deficiency is common in India, probably because of the lack of animal foods in their diets. Indians also typically have a more enriched small intestinal microbiota than other geographical regions for unclear reasons and increased numbers of bacteria in the small intestine — such as during small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) — is known to induce vitamin B12 deficiency because small intestinal microbes outcompete the host for the valuable vitamin B12 required for DNA synthesis, explain researchers from the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

The same applies to microbes in the large intestines, especially the butyrate-producing bacteria and Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron that have multiple B12 transport genes. Butyrate has systems-wide anti-inflammatory effects crucial for overall health. Whereas B. thetaiotaomicron helps the host to break down antinutrients — phytates and saponins — present in plant foods. In a sense, B12 also nourishes the gut microbiota. And this is also the primary reason why large and small intestinal bacteria synthesize B12 — to support the growth of other microbes, serving their roles as members of the microbial ecosystem. If the host’s diet has sufficient B12, however, the microbes would instead conserve the energy needed to activate 30 genes to produce B12.

“Although cobalamin [vitamin B12] is synthesized by some human gut microbes, it is a precious resource in the gut and is likely not provisioned to the host in significant quantities,” Goodman and colleagues concluded.

Put it simply, gut bacteria can produce vitamin B12. But we shouldn’t rely on them to provide our daily requirement of B12. Because, most of the time, they make B12 for their own needs.