How probiotics can boost your health

PRO = FOR      BIOTIC = LIFE

Until recently, most probiotics in supplements or yoghurts were thought to be more smart marketing than sound science. That’s now changing.

Health researchers were always agreed that probiotics – the microscopic ‘good’ bacteria in the gut – are vital for your health. But there were doubts about whether taking probiotics in supplements was effective and severe doubts that probiotics in yoghurts survived being eaten.

What’s known is that probiotics:

• Are critical for your immune system
• Are vital for your digestion
• Fight food-borne illness
• Crowd out pathogenic (dangerous) bacteria, yeasts, and fungi
• Synthesize specific essential vitamins like B12, folic acid, and K2

… and now we are discovering that they are also able to:

• Fight inflammatory diseases like IBS and colitis
• Reduce the risk and duration of urinary tract and candida infections
• Help prevent traveller’s diarrhoea
• Affect mood and reduce stress
• Aid weight loss

Harvard Medical School, in summary on probiotics in 2015, stated:

“A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that you can treat and even prevent some illnesses with foods and supplements containing certain kinds of live bacteria.

“Some digestive disease specialists recommend them for disorders that frustrate conventional medicine, such as irritable bowel syndrome. Since the mid-1990s, clinical studies suggest that probiotic therapy can help treat several gastrointestinal ills, delay the development of allergies in children, and treat and prevent vaginal and urinary infections in women.”

Other respected research institutions strongly recommend probiotics after a course of antibiotics. So why the controversy?

It’s because for probiotics to affect your health positively, they need to:

• Be alive when you consume them.
• Be present in sufficient numbers.
• Survive being eaten
• Pass, still alive, through the stomach, which is highly acidic.

They then need to establish themselves in the lower gut, where they must remain and breed to boost the numbers and range of the existing ‘friendly’ colonies and crowd out and decrease the disease-producing bacteria. Because the more comprehensive the variety of beneficial probiotics in your gut, the healthier you are.

The top ten reasons for taking probiotic supplements

1. Probiotic strains have now been developed that do reach the gut and can colonize there.
2. Increased diversity of probiotic bacteria is linked to a reduced risk of many diseases. So a supplement with at least five probiotic strains is better than high levels of one or two strains. The makeup of each person’s intestinal flora is unique. A probiotic supplement with only one or two twists may have noticeable benefits for one person but not the next. In contrast, a multi-strain probiotic supplement has a far better chance of delivering health benefits.
3. Increasing the number and variety of probiotics in your diet is very important after a course of antibiotics – because antibiotics kill off both good and bad bacteria.
4. Boosting probiotic levels can fight candida yeast infections, prevent traveller’s diarrhoea, reduce stress, and possibly support weight loss.
5. Increasing the level and diversity of ‘friendly’ bacteria supports the health of your immune system, as 70% of this is located in the gut. Certain probiotic strains may also have an anti-cancer role.
6. The balance of bacteria in the gut directly affects mood and can reduce the risk of some neurodegenerative diseases.
7. A deficiency of probiotics in older people is now thought to contribute to memory loss and impaired cognition.
8. By synthesizing vitamin K and helping the absorption of calcium, probiotics help reduce the risk of osteoporosis.
9. Yoghurts have health benefits but are not usually an effective way to boost your probiotic balance. High-temperature pasteurization kills both good and bad bacteria, and independent studies show that few good bacteria from yoghurts reach the gut.
10. Probiotic bacteria are living organisms and need their food to thrive. These foods are called prebiotics. So any well-designed supplement will include not only resistant probiotic strains but some prebiotics as well.

Source: http://uni-vite.com/microbiotic/how-probiotics-improve-your-health-report/