As more research is done about the gut-brain connection, and gut health becomes more and more of a trending topic among health gurus and nutritionists, you may have heard about the benefits of “probiotics.” What are they, exactly, and how can they help you?
Probiotics help keep your body in balance. As you may have known, your gut environment, or microbiome, contains good bacteria along with bad bacteria. The good bacteria is what probiotics are, and they work to stop the bad bacteria from proliferating and causing infection.
How exactly do you get into contact with “bad bacteria?” Through what you eat! Your contact with foods covered with pesticides, too much alcohol, and antibiotics, along with other sources like chlorinated water and chronic stress, will expose the body to bad bacteria.
When you take probiotic supplements, you are giving your body extra good bacteria in order to keep your body healthy by fighting off bad bacteria. Probiotics fight off the bad bacteria they encounter in order to protect their territory — in order to proliferate and cause infection, the bad bacteria must compete for space. However, if you have the right amount of probiotics in your microbiome, it makes it harder for foreign bacteria to compete for space.
Along with eliminating bad bacteria from your body, probiotics have many other functions too. One of these is the production of vitamins— specifically, folate (B9), biotin (B7), and B12. Probiotics are important in this way because folate, biotin, and B12 deficiency can cause symptoms like weakness, lethargy, shortness of breath, hair loss, brain fog, and depression. Probiotics also have a crucial role in detoxification, as well as improving symptoms while taking antibiotics.
Research validates that approximately 80% of our immunity resides in the gut. Some of the essential tasks of gut bacteria include the elimination of toxins, optimizing hormonal balance, decreasing the effect of cortisol, and balancing insulin, all of which help decrease the incidence of disease.
Probiotics are naturally occurring good bacteria, and adding supplements to your daily routine can have many benefits for your overall health. Akasha Naturals’ vegetarian/non-dairy probiotic formula provides at least 15 billion clinically reliable strains of organisms. Talk to your doctor and ask them if they’re right for you!
References:
https://www.longdom.org/open-access/the-benefits-of-probiotics-on-human-health-1948-5948.S1-003.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5622781/
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/14598-probiotics
https://www.healthline.com/health/folate-deficiency
