I was flipping through the Sunday coupons recently when I saw this ad for a new Nestle product called Boost Kid Essentials. Immunity & More in Every Sip! the headline cries out.
I glanced at the list of bullet points and saw that, in addition to vitamins, minerals, protein and kid-approved taste, the new product includes probiotics.
Now, being the co-op shopper that I am, I know that probiotics are "friendly" bacteria found in yogurt and kefir, among other products. So I thought, I wonder how sour this "kid-approved taste" is?
That's when my eye fell on the illustration and lettering in the bottom left corner of the ad (shown enlarged here): "Immunity support from probiotic straw!"
What?!?
Basically, a Swedish company called BioGaia has created a straw that contains a drop of Lactobacillus reuteri, which is activated by contact with liquid, and then gets sucked in with each sip of the Nestle drink.
This is big news in the world of nutraceuticals. L. reuteri is a naturally occurring bacteria found in the guts of birds and mammals, which -- get this -- has been trademarked by BioGaia.
Reading the Wikipedia entry on L. reuteri is quite an experience. It may prevent childhood diarrhea caused by the rotavirus as well as Salmonella, H. pylori (the cause of ulcers), E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and infant colic. It may cure or prevent tooth decay and gingivitis. Infants in child care who had L. reuteri in their food were sick half as often as those who didn't have it in their diet. And it might be a good replacement for the antibiotics that are routinely fed to livestock animals to increase their growth rates.
It doesn't sound as though L. reuteri occurs naturally in any food products: it's just something that should be present in out intestines, but may not always be there at sufficiently high levels or may have been killed by antibiotics. The commercial supplies of it have been propagated in labs, starting from source bacteria taken from humans.
I've classified this entry as good technology, but I feel a bit ambivalent about it. Obviously, with all the health benefits uncovered so far, it's probably a good technology. But I can't help wondering if there's not some other way to foster this bacteria that occurs naturally in humans without the use of a straw.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Suck It in -- Who Ever Heard of a Probiotic Straw?
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2 comments:
I'm suspicious. Nestle has been in trouble in the past for marketing infant formulas in resource poor areas. They would give free formula to women when they delivered and then their milk would dry up and without a source of clean water children would die from diarrheal illnesses. For a long time, pediatricians boycotted anything by Nestle.
Probiotics are promising, but no one know how much, in what combinations, etc. The hazards of children over-consuming sugar filled "juices" is probably outweighed by any potential benefit of a few colonies of probiotics. I spend hours trying to convince parents that their children don't need juice and that water is a good substitute.
Yes, I neglected to mention the Nestle connection. It's funny, I was originally going to label my post both Good Technology and Bad Technology, but as I wrote it, I couldn't really verbalize my discomfort with it enough to add the Bad Technology label.
And I confess I got swept away by what I had read about the research findings on the Wikipedia (probably written by the companies that are creating probiotic straws). Your point about juice abuse outweighing any benefits of the probiotics is a good one.
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