PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

In combatting the increase in healthcare costs, at present, one of the preventive approaches to medicine has been developed with the upliftment of new synbiotic products. Synbiotic is the synergistic effect of probiotics and prebiotics which exert multiple beneficial effects and have been increasingly used in preventing or treating human diseases since the last ten years. Several trials have reported that synbiotic therapy could help in the treatment of human disease prevention. PubMed, Science Direct, and Google Scholar were searched by keyword ‘prebiotic’, ‘probiotic’, and ‘synbiotic’ for relevant literature from 2000 to 2020. A total of 58 articles were selected and revised. This paper evaluates the effect of synbiotic supplementation on different diseases, for instance, obesity, insulin resistance syndrome, diabetes, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The progressive knowledge on the outcome of synbiotic supplementation on health, recent trends and developments in this field are summarised. However, further research is required to understand the mechanism of how synbiotics affect in different diseases.

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