The bacteria to be used as probiotics should be able to resist
inhibitory factors in the gastrointestinal tract such as bile salts
[304]. For this purpose, the effect of different concentrations of bile
salts on the growth of L. acidophilus bacteria in MRS broth was
investigated and the results are presented in Table 3. The total
viable count of L. acidophilus decreased with an increase in the bile
salt concentration when compared with the control. L acidophilus
showed reasonable growth at all bile salt concentrations studied.
The bile tolerance results were 87.41%, 75.49%, 69.53% and 54.96
% for the 0.1%, 0.3%, 0.5% and 1.0 % of bile salt concentrations. The
ability of L. acidophilus to resist bile salts was studied by other
researchers [31, 32].