Health Benefits of Probiotics

Unless you’ve been living under a proverbial rock, you’ve most likely read an article or two over the last few years about the importance of gut health. It turns out that 80% of our immune system lives in our gut. If our gut isn’t healthy – we’re not healthy.

One of the best things you can do to improve the health of your gut is to eat more probiotic-rich foods. Probiotics are the good bacteria that help you digest your food and boost your immune system’s health.

Here are some other awesome benefits of probiotics:

Probiotics Can Help Prevent and Treat Diarrhea

If you’ve recently taken a course or two of antibiotics, you may now be suffering with diarrhea. That’s because antibiotics cannot tell the difference between good bacteria and bad bacteria, so they end up wiping out all of the good bacteria in your gut. When you replace the good bacteria, your gut function can get back to normal.

May Improve Certain Mental Health Conditions

Studies have now linked gut health to mental health. It appears that by improving gut health through probiotic supplementation, some mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression and autism may see improvements.

Improve Heart Health

Certain strains of probiotics have been shown to keep your heart healthy by lowering LDL (bad) cholesterol in the blood. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the benefits of probiotics, but you can start to see how important good bacteria are for gut health, and how important gut health is to overall health. To get more of these good bacteria in your gut, be sure to eat plenty of probiotic-rich foods such as Greek yogurt, kefir, and sauerkraut. If you’re not a fan of these foods, talk to your doctor about using a probiotic supplement.

SOURCES:

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/8-health-benefits-of-probiotics

https://www.health.harvard.edu/nutrition/understanding-the-health-benefits-of-taking-probiotics

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4045285/