Review: The market of probiotics.

ABSTRACT

The advertising of probiotics in diary products on the market has claimed several health-improving properties, including prevention and treatment of obesity, cardiovascular diseases and cancer prophylaxis, osteoporosis and arthritis treatment, diabetes management and control of hypercholesterolemia. Therefore, it is reasonable to emphasize the perspective of a new self-care and integrative medicine season, where food industry is turned to research-oriented management with putative clinical goals to be achieved. We searched Pubmed/Medline using the terms "probiotics" and "market". Selected papers until 2013 were chosen on the basis of their content (clinical evidence-based quality). We performed an accurate investigation on the so-called "probiotic market", leading to better understanding the role of nutraceutical products in the human clinical nutrition physiology. As nutraceutical products are sold all over the world, information, provided by this review may be useful to evaluate their potential impact on human health.