Gut Instincts & Probiotics

31 Jul Gut Instincts & Probiotics

The microbiota is the community of bacterial and other organisms that inhabit our body: sinus, skin, and mouth and throughout our gastrointestinal tract. The largest community is located in the colon. The average human has approximately 1000 trillion microbes and the average American has 1200 different species. These gut bacteria are major actors with regard to our health, tuning up the immune system and decrease systemic inflammation. And they follow the food we eat, according to a recent article by Stacy T. Sims in EcoWatch.

…The easiest way to manipulate your gut flora is by enriching your diet with a variety of probiotics and prebiotics. Probiotics are the actual bacteria that live in your gut. Prebiotics are the substances that the bacteria eat. Food sources are the best way to get both of these, since the diversity of the bacteria in supplements is not as smart as nature; your second choice could be a high-quality, specific-flora supplement.

Every day scientists are discovering more benefits of having teeming, diverse gut colonies. Some probiotic health and performance benefits we know for certain include:

1. Improved Energy

Probiotics and a healthy gut flora facilitate good and healthy digestion, allowing you to optimally absorb all the vitamins and minerals you need to perform and recover.

2. Increased Immunity

Research shows that probiotics is one of the most surprising ways to improve immunity and can help fight bad bacteria and fend off and reduce the duration of upper respiratory infections (such as the common cold) and gastrointestinal woes such as diarrhea. One particularly interesting study found that highly trained distance runners (who are prone to falling ill from overtaxed immune systems) had less than half the number of sick days when they pumped up their diet with probiotics.

3. Heat Tolerance

Though more research is needed, it appears that having a healthy level of probiotics also improves exercise performance in the heat. In one study, runners were tasked to run to exhaustion in a series of tests pre- and postprobiotic supplementation (specifically 45 billion CFU of lactobacillus, bifidobacterium and streptococcus strains)….

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