BREAKTHROUGH FOR LOCAL SUPER BREW
SCIENTISTS have proven drinking a brew from a locally-made coffee pod that contains postbiotics provokes the same immune response as popping a traditional supplement.
Coffee Roasters Australia director Alana Beattie released the Brulife postbiotic blend in 2019, but faced scepticism around the product’s effectiveness, so she called in the CSIRO and Griffith University to test it.
“We’d had lab reports done, but there wasn’t a lot of supporting data around postbiotic products,” Ms Beattie said.
“A lot of people didn’t believe in the product, so we really needed an independent body to back it up.”
So she did, with support from the Australian Government’s Innovation Connections program, facilitated by CSIRO, which connected Ms Beattie with researchers from Griffith University.
Postbiotics, like their better-known relatives probiotics, may have health benefits for some people including a boosted immune system, and prevention and treatment of some stomach conditions and allergies.
To test whether the coffee provoked the same immune response as a conventional prebiotic, researchers exposed human immune cells to it.
Griffith University senior lecturer of Immunology Amanda Cox said she was surprised to discover the postbiotics, which do not require refrigeration like pre and probiotics, activated the cells in much the same way.
“Postbiotics are really all the leftover bits from when probiotics are made – it’s not live bacteria, but it could be dead cells, parts of cells, or secretions from live bacteria,” Dr Cox said.
“It hadn’t been shown that leftover parts could turn on the immune cells in the same way as probiotics can.
“We saw that they can, and that the immune cells then produce a range of different immune proteins.”
The researchers found the strength of the responses varied between the samples, which they said was consistent with how the strength of immune responses can vary between individuals.
“We had thought that the postbiotics would be a bit junky or dirty and may make the immune cells unhappy, so we were surprised that they were still surviving and producing their immune proteins,” Dr Cox said.
“The fact that we could apply our skills and knowledge to a local business was also a positive for us.”