Probiotic Foods
Submitted by Healthy Foods and Eating Healthy
  photo credit: avlxyz |
Probiotic foods are foods that contain friendly or beneficial bacteria. The actual term probiotic means ‘for life’. Probiotics are simply organisms that live in your intestines, (specifically the colon), aid with digestion, and are beneficial to your health as they combat bad bacteria and help fight disease.
The most commonplace to find probiotic organisms are in yoghurt. Yoghurt which contains probiotics is commonly labelled ‘bio-live’, ‘probiotic’, or ‘active’.
Probiotics work in several different ways. They combat inflammatory processes. They secrete compounds which regulate cell functions, and they reduce the growth of bacteria which cause disease by inhibiting their attachment to the intestine and by producing chemicals that reduce or slow down their growth.
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Additionally they assist with the digestion of food and with the manufacture of vitamins, and believed to help strengthen the immune system and reduce blood cholesterol.
There is a fine balance between good and bad bacteria in our gut and this balance can be easily upset allowing the bad bacteria to become prominent. Stress, poor diet, illness, antibiotics, and prescription drugs can and will upset the balance to our detriment.
This imbalance actually has a medical name. It’s called disbiosis, and has been linked with a number of problems including irritable bowel syndrome, constipation, colon cancer, diarrhoea, ME, food allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, and even thrush.
By now you should be beginning to see that there is a benefit to topping up your probiotics on a daily basis. To be effective however the probiotics need to reach the colon insufficiently large numbers to make a difference. This means overcoming and resisting the effects of digestion, gastric juice in the stomach, and bile in the small intestine.
When they get to the colon there has to be enough left for them to reproduce and establish themselves. Therefore it is no good taking a probiotic yoghurt one-day and not taking another for days later. In order to be effective a daily topping up with new supplies of probiotic organisms are required.
In other words bio-live yoghurt should become part of your daily diet.
