A healthy gut fights off cancer
There's no clearer way to say it: Your health depends on what's going on in your gut. That's why I'm such a fan of probiotics.
A well-controlled study put the spotlight on healthy live bacteria that normally help to protect the colon. Researchers studied 80 people in the early stages of colon-cancer development. The participants either already had cancerous tumors in their colons or had recently had colon polyps, which are a sign of cancerous tumors on the horizon, removed.
The group was randomly divided in half, with one subgroup to be given a probiotic and the other a placebo.
The probiotic formulation was paired with a prebiotic (which are food for the healthy bacteria), making the formulation actually a "synbiotic." Also included were two particular strains of bacteria that are considered especially colon- protective: Lactobacillus rhamnosus and Bifidobacterium.
At the end of the study, researchers discovered that those who had taken the synbiotic for 12 weeks saw that the tables had turned in the balance of their colon bacteria. The two strains of healthy bacteria were in the majority, while the bacteria suspected of increasing colon-cancer risk, Clostridium, were in the minority.
The synbiotic group also showed less damage to the DNA in their colon linings and less growth and reproduction of colon cells (as opposed to more for people who have colon cancer, so less is better in this case) than those who received only the placebo.
I know this is a lot of "biotic" talk, but the main point to take away is to get yourself on a good probiotic supplement. Freeze-dried products work well, and you don't have to worry about their dying off or losing potency as you do with the live products. A couple of solid, widely available multi-strain products are PB8 and Kyodophilus.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't consider a live product—you just have to be mindful of a couple of things. One is that if it's kept refrigerated before and after the date of purchase (be sure that the store you purchase it from has kept it in the refrigerator) and you use it in a couple of weeks, the live product confers a few more overall benefits than does the freeze-dried product. One excellent live product is All-Flora from New Chapter. And for optimum benefit, you should aim for a minimum of 10 billion colony-forming units (CFU's) per day. You'll see them referred to as simply "bacteria" or "organisms." The more healthy bacteria you maintain in your gut, the better equipped your system will be to fight off infections and chronic diseases like cancer.
