Research Progress on Development and Application of Postbiotic in Foods

The postbiotic concept had unified the original confusing concept of inactivated probiotics and attracted wider attention. Currently, postbiotics were mainly prepared by traditional probiotics, but as the research on next-generation probiotics intensifies, the strains that fit the postbiotic concept are constantly being updated. First of all, improving intestinal health was the most important health effect of postbiotics, including relieving intestinal inflammation, modulating intestinal microbiome, and relieving constipation. Secondly, this paper explained that postbiotics could also act on other tissues to improve metabolic abnormalities, maintain oral health and play other functions. The revelation of bioactive components was the key to elucidating the diverse functions of postbiotics. Traditionally, it was believed that the bioactive components were mainly bacterial structural components, such as extracellular polysaccharides and peptidoglycan, and etc.. However, recent studies had confirmed that short-chain fatty acids, intracellular proteins, amino acid metabolites, and etc., also played an important role, and that postbiotics were also considered to be a collection of multiple efficacy components. This also meant that it could activate multiple cell surface receptors at the same time, triggering synergistic effects or cross-reactions, thus exerting a more direct and wider range of bioactive effects. Finally, from the perspective of industrialization, postbiotic had unique advantages such as higher safety, more convenient storage and transportation, more direct action, and etc., and had a very good application prospect in functional dietary supplements, food quality improvers, preservatives, and etc.. There were some problems and difficulties in the process of industrialization, such as the insufficient evidence for efficacy of postbiotic, the lack of supporting safety assessment methods, qualitative and quantitative testing methods, and the lack of legal and regulatory support.