Inhibiting Salmonella and Listeria growth

About 760,000 pre-school children in developing countries die from diarrhea related causes each year. Another devastating medical condition, severe acute malnutrition, affects almost 20 million preschool children worldwide and is a causative factor of a third of the deaths that occur in these children. Probiotics are effective in the control and prevention of diarrhea in children. Peanut butter is being used as a major ingredient of Ready to Use Therapeutic Foods (RUTFs) for the treatment of severe malnutrition. Studies conducted in a UGA food science laboratory have shown that peanut butter is able to protect different probiotic bacteria during storage and under simulated gastrointestinal conditions. Thus, "probiotic peanut butter" has been proposed as a possible intervention to address malnutrition and diarrhea concurrently in developing countries. A UGA study investigated the behavior of probiotics and selected bacterial pathogens co-inoculated into peanut butter during gastrointestinal simulation. The presence of probiotics caused a significant reduction in the population of Salmonella and Listeria. Results suggest that peanut butter is a plausible carrier to deliver probiotics to improve the gastrointestinal health of children in developing countries.