We hear the commercials about yogurt being good for our gut. We hear about healthy bacteria, but do we know how and why it is important to have enough?
Can we get enough healthy bacteria from yogurt? Store bought yogurt… no we can’t. Store bought yogurt sits on store shelves for weeks or maybe months. The bacteria will die. It is impossible to know if there is any left. Store bought yogurt often times contains sugar, which causes an imbalance in our healthy microbiome. Sugar feeds yeast in our body’s which causes an imbalance between good bacteria and bad bacteria and yeast.
What kills off healthy gut bacteria. Antibiotics is the most common one. But I don’t take antibiotics you say….. do you eat meat from the supermarket? Then you probably are ingesting antibiotics on a regular basis. Animals are fed antibiotics on a regular basis as a preventative to prevent disease.
We are getting antibiotics in our water. People take them and then pee them out, and they end up in our water. Animals are taking them and peeing them out, They get in our water.
So what is a person to do? Eat fermented foods like sauerkraut, not with vinegar. Real fermented stuff. Usually sold in health foods stores and in organic section of supermarkets. Kimchi which is sauerkraut, but Asian style, which is often times made spicy. Drink Kombucha. But be careful, because a lot of store bought is high in sugar. They don’t let it ferment long enough for the scoby to eat up the sugar. Kombucha really shouldn’t taste sweet.
If you don’t like fermented foods then you should be taking a probiotic. Don’t be fooled by company’s that will show you a product with 50 or 100 billion culture strains. This is marketing fluff. Most of the strains they have in their product don’t with stand the acidity of the stomach.
I use a brand that the company spends millions of research and uses only two strands which are the strongest. It has only 12 billion but it is effective and does the job.
So what does this healthy gut bacteria do for us? These great guys produce B vitamins, K vitamins, help give us a healthy immune system. If you suffer from depression, you may be lacking in these great bacteria, because they produce over 80% of your serotonin,, which is your happy hormone. Along with that if your liver isn’t healthy it may not be able to get rid of extra estrogen your body doesn’t need, This extra estrogen competes with serotonin.
Maybe before going the med route, you may want to try increasing your healthy gut bacteria and keeping your liver clean and healthy.
Just food for thought.!!!
these two links are for the probiotics I recommend, as well as the best selling bar that supports our digestive track.
https://www.usana.com/s/UtejE
https://www.usana.com/s/PLU_22
