Word: bacterias
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...about a century, scientists have been studying the role bacteria play in the gastrointestinal tract, a complex ecosystem made up of helpful and harmful bugs whose interactions aren't fully understood. The bugs begin to infiltrate when we're born. Some make us sick, while others help the body work better. An average adult gut contains about a kilogram of bacteria - 100 trillion bugs of some 500 different species...
...numbers. "What's exciting," says managing director Tim York, "is that today it's a $7 billion market, and it's projected to be worth $20 billion by 2010." The big players include companies like Japan's Yakult and France's Danone (Dannon in the U.S.), which sell probiotic bacteria in yogurt. Dannon's Activia yogurt was launched in America in 2006 and passed $100 million in sales in its first year...
...stake its claim, the Australian company has just done a deal with Denmark's Danisco to produce straws containing three strains of freeze-dried bacteria that "wake up" when they come into contact with liquid. Unlike yogurt, the straws don't need to be refrigerated and can be consumed in juice. The price could be as little as half that of a probiotic yogurt...
...These packs are designed to preserve milk or juice without refrigeration for a year - which means all bacteria in them must be killed. York's pitch is that the new Aussie straw can not only add flavor but put the "good" bacteria back. "Tetra Pak is excited because the straw allows the package to do things it can't do today," he says. "In the next three to five years, we'd like to be selling a billion-plus straws a year...
...idea that adding bacteria to the diet could boost health came from the Russian physiologist and 1908 Nobel Prize winner Elie Metchnikoff. He believed that long-lived Bulgarians were benefiting from bugs in their fermented dairy foods. The most common probiotics are strains of Lactobacillus, used as starter cultures in yogurts, or Bifidobacterium, found from infancy in the gut and believed to improve immunity...