Fermented foods: a perspective on their role in delivering biotics

Abstract

Fermented foods are often erroneously equated with probiotics. Although they might act as delivery vehicles for probiotics, or other ‘biotic’ substances, including prebiotics, synbiotics, and postbiotics, stringent criteria must be met for a fermented food to be considered a ‘biotic’. Those criteria include documented health benefit, sufficient product characterization (for probiotics to the strain level) and testing. Similar to other functional ingredients, the health benefits must go beyond that of the product’s nutritional components and food matrix. Therefore, the ‘fermented food’ and ‘probiotic’ terms may not be used interchangeably. This concept would apply to the other biotics as well. In this context, the capacity of fermented foods to deliver one, several, or all biotics defined so far will depend on the microbiological and chemical level of characterization, the reproducibility of the technological process used to produce the fermented foods, the evidence for health benefits conferred by the biotics, as well as the type and amount of testing carried out to show the probiotic, prebiotic, synbiotic, and postbiotic capacity of that fermented food.

Fermented foods, their microbiome and its potential in boosting human health

“…However, the production and consumption of FFs traditionally consumed only in specific countries are changing with globalisation (Rastogi et al, 2022). For instance, products obtained from fermented legumes (e.g., tempeh) are traditionally consumed in several Asiatic countries and are a consistent part of their cultural heritage, but have attracted greater interest from Western populations quite recently (Vinderola et al, 2023). While some of these FFs have continued to be produced using traditional methods of production, that is, depending on local resources and environmental conditions, most have undergone significant technological advancements in order to meet global demand (Panda & Shetty, 2018).…”

“…Furthermore, it is essential to underscore that a significant portion of the analysed studies showed in Figure 5, and aiming to characterise the gut microbiome, employed the 16S rRNA sequencing method or even more outdated molecular analysis (i.e., DGGE and qPCR), that do not target the entire genomic content of a sample and do not allow to reach the strain-level characterisation. As a consequence, a more in-depth characterisation of the gut microbiome would be necessary in order to explore FFs-gut microbiome relationships, since a strain-level diversity in the gut exists (De Filippis et al, 2019, 2020Tett et al, 2019) and this may influence the impact of dietary or drug treatments (Vinderola et al, 2023). In addition, most of the available interventions are conducted on yogurt and other dairy products.…”

“…Given these assumptions, FFs represent an optimal source of potentially probiotic strains, although fermentation does not necessarily lead to the selection of probiotics, therefore the terms "fermented food" and "probiotic" cannot be used interchangeably (Marco et al, 2021;Vinderola et al, 2023). Firstly, most of the confirmed probiotic strains belong to genera often involved in food fermentations such as the former Lactobacillus and Lactococcus (Lavefve et al, 2019).…”

A value chain to improve human, animal and insect health in developing countries

“…All from an almost forgotten ancient pastime of fermentation, a process that preserves the food from spoilage and increases nutritional value. The rejuvenated global interest in fermented foods, based on scientific research and clinical evidence, augurs well for these types of initiatives in developing countries [ 4 ] .…”

Current Research on Flavor Compounds in Fermented Food Products

“…In addition to their culinary appeal, fermented foods are increasingly recognized for their potential health benefits and role in promoting gut health [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ]. The fermentation process enhances the bioavailability of nutrients, increases the diversity of microbial species in the gut microbiota, and produces bioactive compounds with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.…”