Probiotics : Advanced Food and Health Applications

Probiotics: Advanced Food and Health Applications presents the functional properties and advanced, technological aspects of probiotics for food formulation, nutrition and health implications. Specifically, the book addresses the fundamentals of probiotics, from their discovery to actual developments, the microbiological aspects of the main genus showing probiotic properties, the natural occurrence of probiotic strains in foods, the development of nutraceuticals based on probiotics, and the relationships of probiotics with health. Finally, the book covers regulatory aspects. Food scientists, nutritionists, dieticians, pharmaceutical scientists and others working in, or studying, related fields will benefit from this resource.

• Introduces basic concepts on probiotics and describes the properties of main microorganisms with applications in probiotics
• Provides a description on the natural presence of probiotics in different food matrixes and how probiotics can be developed for incorporation in food formulations
• Offers advice on how probiotics can be used as nutritional input, along with their value on the preservation of healthy intestinal status, and their potential benefits in specific illnesses
• Contains definitions, applications, literature reviews and recent developments
• Includes a general introduction to the subject, taxonomy, biology, primary sources of probiotics and development of probiotics as food ingredients, human nutrition and health properties, and the use of high-throughput technologies in probiotics characterization