Probiotic is one of the biggest buzzwords in nutrition both for people and aquariums, but the entire movement has a dirty secret. It’s cheap and easy to dust everything from foods to salt and even water with probiotic ‘spores’ – usually just Lactobacillus bacteria – but unless you verify their viability, there’s really no way to know that the probiotics added to a food are actually effective and doing anything for you.
Probiotix by New Life Spectrum is a new food from one of the aquarium world’s leading pioneers in fish and aquarium nutrition. It’s easy to see the word ‘probiotic’ and lump Probiotix with all of the other foods currently jumping on this bandwagon but New Life Spectrum is very serious about the use of probiotic spores, and they’ve taken great lengths to ensure that what they are doing is actually making a difference.
In regular flake and pellet food making processes the heat required essentially ‘cooks’ all probiotic spores and makes them unviable – dead and useless. Many aquarium foods make bold claims about the probiotics added before the flakes and pellets are formed, but New Life Spectrum turned to a specially engineered, low temperature cold-extrusion process to ensure their probiotics are alive and viable.
Furthermore New life Spectrum has tested the viability of the probiotics in their foods by having them lab tested for active probiotics, and have confirmed over 3 MILLION live cultures per gram of food. The reason aquarists should care is that having real, viable probiotics in the food improves digestion, and results in cleaner water of the aquarium.
The name of the game for reef tanks is keeping the water as clean as possible so by using the concentrated nutrition found in New Life Spectrum pellets and feeding less, the use of Probiotix fish food should really help to keep a clean reef aquarium environment, especially in a reef tank with plenty of fish.
