What Are Probiotics?
Probiotics are the healthy bacteria that live within our digestive tract. They help us absorb nutrients from our food, protect our fragile gut wall, and ward off sickness and disease. We’ve got good bugs and bad bugs throughout our body (and we need both), but the good guys need to outweigh the bad. We should be working with 85% good bacteria to 15% bad.
For most of us eating a Standard American diet, the ratio is way off. Too many grains, sugars, and cheap oils and not enough omega-3’s and probiotic-rich foods, and we are left to deal with diarrhea, low energy, uneven moods, and a higher risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, dementia, etc. No bueno.
In addition to grains, sugar and cheap oils, the other things that kill the good bacteria are:
Antibiotics (when you have to take antibiotics, increase your probiotics!) (Don’t forget about the meat we eat from cattle that were given antibiotics. Choose grass-fed!)
GMO foods
Stress
Chemicals and toxins
Now that you know what to avoid, how do we get more probiotics??
Let’s start with eating. Here is a list of probiotic-rich foods:
Sauerkraut (I eat this every day either with my eggs in the morning, on salad at lunch or as a small side with dinner. It adds an amazing crunch and tangy flavor. Everyone I know who tries it, loves it - either off the bat or eventually!!)
Kombucha (a black fermented tea - my favorite way to combat that post meal sugar craving!)
Apple Cider Vinegar with “the Mother” (makes a great salad dressing)
Kimchi (a pickled korean dish)
Kefir or Coconut Kefir
Yogurt (live cultured or greek, no sugar added)
Kvass
Miso
Tempah
Natto
Raw/Unpasteurized Cheese
*Make sure your probiotic foods do not contain any vinegars or other preservatives as they kill off the live bacteria. Look for the words like “fermented,” “active,” “alive,” “raw” or “live cultured”.
The other way to get more good bacteria into your system is to take a supplement.
First of all, before you take any supplements, you should check with your doctor. Once you get the OK, the two brands I trust are Garden of Life and MegaFood. Look for a quality brand with at least 50 billion CFU counts and strains of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium. I’d recommend you start off slow with just one tablet per day. After about two months, you can increase to two per day if you aren’t eating probiotic foods and/or noticing any positive changes.
Some final questions you might be thinking...“Why does this all feel so new? Did we eat probiotics back in the day?”
Probiotics are not new but we are learning more about our gut flora every day. And yes, we did eat probiotics back in the day. Before the refrigerator made its way into homes in the 1930s, we preserved our foods by fermenting them in jars with salt. This is how the good bacteria grows! We also had better quality soil (another way probiotics make their way into our system). Herbicides, pesticides and other dangerous agricultural practicing are killing the good bugs which is another reason why we are getting fewer probiotics in our diet.
Let me leave you with this final snip-it:
We have about 10 trillion live microbes in our body. That is 10x the amount of cells we have in our entire body! And together they all weigh about five pounds! That’s how important probiotics are for our body!