Authenticity of probiotic foods and dietary supplements: A pivotal issue to address

Abstract

The market of probiotic foods and supplements is growing rapidly but frequently the commercialized products are not compliant with their labels in terms of claimed probiotic strain(s) and labeled number of viable probiotic cells, thus mining the authenticity of these probiotic products.

In this review, we provide an up-to-date overview of: (i) the current regulatory aspects, (ii) the consistency of probiotic foods and supplements with their labels, (iii) the implications of mislabeling on the quality, safety and functionality of these products and (iv) the available and most promising methods to assess the authenticity of these products, taking into account the need to discriminate among the different physiological states probiotics might be in the carrier matrices. It arises that authenticity of probiotic foods and supplements is an urgent issue, of industrial and legislation relevance, that need to be addressed. A plethora of methods are available to reach this goal, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Protocols that combine the use of propidium monoazide (PMA) with metagenomics or polyphasic approaches including the PMA real time PCR or flow cytometry (for the viability assessment) and the whole genome sequence analysis (for the identification and typing of the probiotic strain) are the most promising that should be standardized and used by producers and regulators.

Keywords:

• probiotics
• lactic acid bacteria
• viable but not culturable (VBNC) probiotic
• genomics
• label compliance
• propidium monoazide and reverse transcription real time PCR

View correction statement:

Correction

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Author contributions

VF, FF and DC wrote the manuscript. VF conceived the work, revised the overall manuscript and was responsible for the overall review quality control. All authors contributed to the revision of the manuscript and read and approved the submitted manuscript.