Marketing goes for the gut
Food companies don't let the grass grow under their feet when they get a whiff of a potential new health product. And they've wasted no time adding probiotics as an ingredient to a range of foods, slapping on a health claim and promoting it like crazy. Probiotics are one more trend in a long train of marketable goods that a health-food-crazed market can't seem to get enough of.
Who'd have thought someone would find a way to promote bacteria as a health food? But they did—and this is one I'm all for. Probiotics are actually good bacteria that inhabit your gut. They're necessary for good digestion.
I've been telling you about the benefits of probiotics for some time now. And the studies back me up.
Probiotics aren't just critical for digestion, they can be the key to better immunity overall. They fight off bad bacteria that lead to illness. So the more healthy bacteria you maintain in your gut, the better equipped your system will be to fight off infections.
Antibiotics, known to kill off bacteria, kill off all bacteria—including the good. It's what I emphasize repeatedly with my patients: If you're on an antibiotic, you need to be taking a probiotic right along with it.
More studies are in the works, especially as popularity grows. Currently, you can find it on supermarket shelves, added into yogurts, cheese, chocolate—and even baby formulas.
You'll also find prebiotics added, as well. What do they do? Nourish the probiotics. Remember, probiotics are live bacteria, and they need to eat, too. 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."
