Efficacy of Dead Probiotic Cells

Worldwide consumer's awareness and inclination towards healthful food products capable of conferring health benefits besides providing basic nutrition have led to coin the term functional foods. Foods that contain some health-promoting component(s) beyond traditional nutrients are termed as functional foods. Demonstrated therapeutic evidence has projected probiotics as one of the fastest growing categories of functional food but the market survey of fermented and probiotic containing foods indicated presence of significantly lower levels of viable cells in contrast to those expressed on the product label [2, 4, 9]. In 2013, the global probiotic market was estimated as a value of USD 32.06 billion and is expected to reach USD 52.34 billion by 2020