Abstract

This article studies the Internet advertising of food and drinks containing probiotics – potentially beneficial bacteria marketed as a means to strengthen the body's ‘defence mechanisms’. Using the framework of critical genre analysis, I describe discursive and semiotic means by which probiotics emerge as a credible ‘tool’ for building the ‘inner armour’ of immunity and as a locus of interlinked discourses on biomedicine, science, nutrition and the body. In my analysis, I examine the multitude of strategies with the help of which texts placed on the websites of probiotics producers promote the companies and their products, and in this process formulate different visions of the body's relationship with food, construct scientific facts as an exclusive guide for individuals on what foods they should and should not be eating, and position responsibility for the management of wellbeing with the individual.