Probiotics and Good Gut Health

One of the chief benefits of probiotics is its ability to significantly improve a person’s gut health. We’re talking about your entire digestive system, including the intestinal area. Those who suffer from numerous gastrointestinal problems like stress related stomach reactions, irritable bowel syndrome, and problems which arise from lactose intolerance frequently find relief through probiotics.

Likewise, because GERD (Gastro Esophageal Reflux Disease) originates with digested food, many people have reported that probiotics have relieved symptoms from the disease. In fact, some doctors even suggest using probiotics to help prevent food poisoning and traveler’s diarrhea and for treating diarrhea caused by antibiotics and viruses.

There are a few ways to increase the probiotics in your intestinal system. One way is through foods that are rich in the bacteria. Yogurt is the one that comes first to mind. Other food items include buttermilk, powdered milk, sour cream, and even some frozen desserts.

However, because it’s sometimes impractical to get all the recommended probiotics through food, probiotic supplements can be a great way of increasing the amount of this “friendly bacteria” inside your body.

There are very few side-effects associated with probiotics. These few might rarely include stomach bloating and gas. Even these side effects often decrease with time as you continue taking the probiotics supplements.

Even today, there are ongoing studies about the gut benefits of probiotics, and new benefits are discovered regularly. For instance, doctors from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine suspect that probiotics might decrease substance in a person’s urine, which cause kidney stones (although these studies are still ongoing).

Also, a new meta-analysis from Australia, conducted in 2007, shows that the risk of a gastrointestinal problem in premature babies known as necrotizing enterocolitis, might be cut as much as 74 percent through use of probiotic supplements by the mother.

Research has already uncovered so much positive about the use of probiotics and almost nothing negative. Best of all, the research, and the good news, have just started!

Antibiotics and the Effects on Gut Health

If you’re like most people, you’ve heard people recommend taking antibiotics for infections all of your life. But be warned: Evidence seems to be mounting that the over-use of antibiotics can actually be detrimental to your overall gut health.

One study that has caught a lot of attention was conducted by Stanford University researchers. Their conclusion was that a prolonged use of antibiotics could negatively impact the populations of friendly gut bacteria, which are so essential for eliminating disease.

Maybe you remember several months ago when so many cases of the MRSA superbug were reported. Doctors almost unanimously believe this has arisen because of the overuse of antibiotics. More and more medical professionals are recognizing that use of antibiotics should be used as the exception rather than the rule.

But it’s not just MRSA and other superbugs that are the problem with antibiotics. Perhaps more important is their ability to kill off friendly bacteria in our guts. These good bacteria that they destroy are essential, not just to our gut (or intestinal area), but our whole body. And yet the Stanford researchers found that use of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin (or “cipro”) affected 30 percent of the test subjects’ bacterial species.

Some of the volunteers showed a dramatic decrease in bacterial diversity. In addition, the study showed that following the antibiotic treatment, it took as much as a month for most gut bacteria strains to return to the level where they were before treatment. The researchers concluded that during this month when the bacteria were at reduced levels, harmful bacteria could have proliferated and caused disease.

Add to this the fact that doctors are now seeing antibiotics causing a delay in the recovery from the cold and flu and causing antibiotic diarrhea, and maybe you can understand why antibiotics are no longer seen as the ideal bacteria-fighting wonder-drug that they once were.
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