Probiotic health food for the skin

Many other minerals and essential amino acids are present in milk as well, but in smaller amounts. Riboflavin and other vitamins, fat, and sugar (lactose) provide the energy in milk and the flavour that makes it taste good. In particular, milk produced directly after birth, colostrum, has exceptional biological activity, which is important for the stimulation of development processes in newborns.

 Milk has a long standing in beauty history. Cleopatra, for example, bathed in milk to enhance her skin’s youthfulness. It is not surprising to see that, since the start of this millennium, the use of milk- based active ingredients in cosmetic formulations has shown strong and continuing growth. By fractionating the different proteins and peptides from milk, active ingredients are obtained with a multitude of extremely beneficial effects on skin, whether they are anti-wrinkle and firming effects or ingredients which are specifically suitable for the care of strongly inflamed and troubled skin.

Combining the use of probiotic bacteria in a milk-based nutrient is something the food industry has been doing successfully for quite some years now. ‘Pro bio’ means ‘for life’, and the probiotic bacteria, consumed orally, are thought to be maintained in the gut, binding to intestinal epithelial cells and preventing the growth of pathogenic bacteria, thus promoting gastrointestinal health. Additionally, probiotic bacteria have shown to possess many beneficial effects on immune function. In the intestines they do so by stimulating the intestinal epithelial cells – not like a whole microbe, but with their structural components and metabolites. This has been reported to lead to an improvement of the barrier function of these cells, among other effects.