The increasing use of functional foods by the public to improve their general health and prevent the incidence of chronic diseases (eg, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer) has become a major area of interest within the nutrition community. Of the many functional foods available, probiotics have been best studied with regard to disease prevention and most actively promoted commercially to the American public. Fermented foods containing large quantities of "good" bacteria, or that contain more bacteria than what is usually ingested daily in American diets, have been consumed for a prolonged period of time in Europe to promote good health. Many reviews in the European literature suggest that the probiotics in these foods may aid in preventing major health problems, such as postoperative gramnegative sepsis and other nosocomial infections in hospitalized patients, and in preventing gastroenteritis in daycare centers and retirement homes (1, 2). Because of the increasing interest in functional foods and in probiotics in particular, we organized this symposium as an American Society for Clinical Nutrition event and obtained an educational grant from the Dannon Foundation to have it published as a supplement to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Topics and speakers (authors) were selected to cover important basic and clinical areas of investigation with regard to the mechanisms of interaction between probiotics and the gastrointestinal tract, eg, bacterial-epithelial crosstalk, and to review objective evidence of probiotic benefits in the prevention and treatment of human disease. Finally, we predicted the long-range potential for the clinical uses of this type of functional food for health and disease.
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