Probiotics and Prebiotics :

Probiotic definition : Bacteria, yeasts and virus that have positive health effects when eaten or in contact with other body surfaces, for example some viruses have been recognized responsible for helping the respiratory immune system to keep safe from some nasty bacteria species! More commonly known lactobacteria are well known for their positive health effects like manufacturing vitamins, boosting immunity etc.

Even if all milk kefir is full of good lactobacteria I can't say scientifically that milk kefir will have positive health effect! Why ? Because all milk kefir are different and scientific endeavor is supposed to have very reproducible settings and this is not possible if the substrate we are trying to test is never the same. This vision of scientific protocols is of course heavily influenced by the dominant market that is able to produce very consistent and stable products we swallow in different forms. On the other side other fuzzy paradigms like some sports are considered healthy even if the concerned people are not training in completely controlled conditions, we have been able to name it healthy through common sense and with statistical confirmation. Along the same idea we could use the same statistical tools if somehow a large company would produce a consistent milk kefir and test it in controlled settings with people who may need it, we could quickly have relevant statistical results! But milk kefir being non patentable their is little money for that paradigm to be exploited and it's therefore unlikely to happens, so we'll never know . And like if it was not enough when we get a scoby from an external source we don't know how well cared it has been, and it could possibly have been contaminated with nasty bacteria or yeasts! Bottom lines :

• The scoby that I call probiotic on this site are not the scoby you buy or get somehow somewhere but are idealized scoby. Practically most scoby behave nicely but some could make us sick depending on the preparation and who or what touch it before. Personally I have experimented nasty bacteria inside a kefir secondary pot for not washing the lid often enough (by the way the lid was mainly touched by condensation, therefore not acidic enough and dripping nasty little drops of I don't know what germs into the main mixture). So prudence and hygiene are fundamental, for example if you get a scoby from an external not fully trusted source
  • Get all the information to do a correct brewing.
  • Do not eat the first (and even second) brew and see how it behaves, smells etc.
  • Try a small quantity the first time and wait for possible effects and if you are too shy even for that ... ask someone else, fully informed of the situation of course.

Prebiotic definition : many different food that help good bacteria and yeasts in our gut.

• The prebiotic effect is much simpler if we admit for example that good bacteria exists we can naturally find different foods that will help them to thrive as long as possible on the track before the final ejection! A well accept concept is that slowly digestible food like whole food with low glycemic index will feed us longer as well as interesting bacteria! At the opposite a high glycemic index could cause an overpopulation of bacteria at the start, literally binging on the fast sugars, then dying on the way because they don't have sustainable reserves, and obviously it's not good to have many good bacteria dying, they won't be good for anything

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