The effect of kefir on the activities of GSH-Px, GST, CAT, GSH and LPO levels in carbon tetrachloride-induced mice tissues.

Functional foods including kefir have increasingly become as popular as before in the developing world. The health benefits of kefir including the antioxidative effects are still under evaluation. Vitamin E is also a well-known antioxidant. The biologically damaging effects of reactive oxygen species are controlled in vivo by a wide spectrum of antioxidant defence mechanisms. Dietary constituents of antioxidative vitamins and other nutrients may play an important role in protecting the body against oxidative damage. The study was carried out to investigate the protective effect of kefir against oxidative damage of CCl4 in mice, compared with the well-known antioxidant vitamin E. Three-week-old Swiss Albino mice, weighing 22-26 g were used for the experiment. At the end of the microbiological analysis of kefir, the averages of the total mesophilic aerobic colony counts, lactic acid bacteria, lactic streptococci, enterococci, and yeasts were found to be 1.04 x 10(9), 9.87 x 10(8), 4.38 x 10(8), 7.80 x 10(4) and 1.26 x 10(5) CFU/ml, respectively. While both vitamin E and kefir were found to have a protective effect against CCl4-induced damage, kefir was more protective. This may probably be the first study to compare the antioxidative action of kefir and vitamin E in the animal model.