Western researcher specializes in probiotics, the next big thing

Wed, March 12, 2008
By MARY-JANE EGAN, SUN MEDIA

For 25 years, a London microbiologist has been trying to convince a dubious world that some bacteria are good for you.

“This is why we’re alive, because we have bugs in the gut that keep us alive,” says Gregor Reid, a professor of microbiology at the University of Western Ontario.

And for the better part of those 25 years of research, Reid’s work with probiotics — so-called “good bacteria” — was dismissed as little more than “snake-oil science,” Reid said.

But today, open any magazine, turn on any TV station or tune in the radio and an endless array of products is being advertised — from yogurt and orange juice to bread and ice cream — all touting the health-care benefits of probiotics and all claiming to be rich in them.

So, does Reid feel vindicated?

No, more like frustrated.

That’s because an assortment of companies has jumped on the probiotics bandwagon with no clinical evidence to back up their claims that their products do, in fact, contain probiotics, he said.

It was Reid’s team at the Lawson Health Research Institute that successfully isolated bacteria — now sold in capsule form — to help combat bladder infections and bacterial vaginosis.

And while the product, called Fem-dophilus, is available around the world, it can be obtained in Canada only through an American website — www.jarrow.com.

That irony is not lost on Reid, who says Health Canada and the Natural Health Products Directorate (NHPD) that oversees such products pays only lip service to probiotic research and has a budget that is “pretty much non-existent.”

“This (Fem-dophilus) was voted one of the top 10 medical breakthroughs for 2007 by Prevention Magazine in the U.S.,” Reid notes. “But the NHPD doesn’t take this research seriously. There were six people reviewing files and we had 63 files ahead of ours,” said Reid.

“In essence, we were being penalized for going through the system properly. Meanwhile, companies are being allowed to put their products on the market and claim they contain probiotics, with absolutely no clinical evidence to back that up.”

Reid said the NHPD is underfunded, under-staffed and “floundering in bureaucracy.”

A call to the directorate was answered by a voice mail message vowing to attempt to return the phone call “within three business days.”

It’s that kind of red tape that Reid said has forced his lab to abandon two promising probiotic projects that simply couldn’t secure Health Canada funding — one studying the benefits of probiotics in healing hospital-acquired infections and surgical wounds and a second on the benefits of Lactobacillus bacteria in killing HIV.

Meanwhile, he notes, the U.S. has recently invested $150 million for the first year of a “micro-bion” project to study all the organisms in the gut and see what genes they express.

For research that originated in London, Reid said it’s disheartening that Health Canada isn’t investing in a field he believes holds promise in fighting everything from cardiovascular disease and diabetes to respiratory disease — “all the big killers.”

Reid said many of his medical students are interested in probiotics but are unlikely to pursue it as a career.

“Why would they?” he asked. “They get no funding. They get no respect. And any Tom, Dick or Harry can come out with a product, claim it has probiotics, and put it on the market without any data to back it up.”

Reid said he doesn’t mind if a product claims it contains Lactobacillus.

“But don’t call it a probiotic,” he said. “There’s live bacteria in yogurt but they’re not probiotic until you’ve added another organism and shown they can bear a specific benefit.”

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Mary-Jane Egan is a Free Press reporter.

Source: The London Free Press