| We read with interest the paper entitled with “The effect of prebiotics on the viability of
encapsulated probiotic bacteria” by A.G. Peredo, et al. (2016) in the journal of LWT -Food
Science and Technology, 73, 191-196. The authors are to be congratulated for their valuable
work on the encapsulation of probiotic bacteria. However, in the third paragraph of introduction
section, they have written that “the combination of probiotics and prebiotics is known as a
symbiotic combination” and also in the first sentence after table 3, part 3.4 of Results and
Discussion section “the combination of probiotics and prebiotics is known as a symbiotic
combination” which used wrong terminology. We think that the word “symbiotic” should be
changed to “synbiotic” which refers to the combination of probiotics and prebiotics in a form of
synergism (synergy + probiotic + prebiotic = synbiotic). The mixture of probiotics and prebiotics
is named as synbiotics that may improve the host health (Gibson & Roberfroid, 1995). A food
product containing the mixture of probiotics and prebiotics is named synbiotic (A Homayouni,
Azizi, Ehsani, Yarmand, & Razavi, 2008; Aziz Homayouni, Azizi, Javadi, Mahdipour, &
Ejtahed, 2012). |