Prebiotics, Postbiotics, Probiotics … What's The Difference & Do I Need All 3?

Probiotics are the beneficial bacteria that help keep us healthy and defend our bodies from certain disease-causing bacteria. Thanks to extensive ongoing research, we've found that probiotics provide a wide range of health benefits that directly support immune system defenses, digestive system function, and detoxification. We get them through probiotic-rich foods like yogurt, miso, kimchi, kombucha, and tempeh.

Probiotic supplements are also an increasingly popular way to boost your intake for gut health. New Chapter's Probiotic All-Flora blend, for example, contains 10 billion colony-forming units of clinically studied friendly bacteria strains formulated in amounts that are shown to work. There are lots of probiotic supplements on the shelf these days—the cool thing about Probiotic All-Flora's daily capsules is that they deliver not just probiotics but also prebiotics and postbiotics for comprehensive benefits when it comes to digestive wellness. This three-in-one blend supports gastrointestinal stress, including bowel regularity, and helps reduce occasional gas, bloating, diarrhea, and constipation. (FYI: The Food and Drug Administration hasn't approved any probiotic supplements for treating or preventing any health problem.)

Prebiotics, simply put, are food for probiotics. They're essentially plant fiber from foods like apples, asparagus, bananas, dandelion greens, garlic, and even nuts that can't be digested. They eventually make their way to your gut to stimulate the growth of beneficial bacteria there. So eating whole-plant, prebiotic-rich foods—or ensuring your probiotic supplement contains prebiotic nourishment—is one of the best things you can do for your microbiome to keep all the beneficial bacteria happy.

Postbiotics are the relatively newer1 microbiome kid on the block. As the name suggests, they are the metabolic by-products created by beneficial bacteria through a fermentation process in the gut when prebiotics feed probiotics. In basic terms, when probiotics digest prebiotics, postbiotics are produced. Scientists are recognizing that they have health-boosting benefits of their own, too.

Early studies are suggesting2 that postbiotics may have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties that help protect, restore, and support our gut health and some of our bodies' physiological processes: Their benefits may include helping our bodies fight infections, control weight gain and blood sugar, and maintain healthy blood pressure and cholesterol.

While more research is still needed to fully understand how postbiotics influence these things, we do know that we can maximize their production by eating fermented foods or supplementing with a probiotic formula that has postbiotic nourishment covered, like New Chapter's Probiotic All-Flora.