Probiotics Keep Our Gut Happy - Part III
Our diet and lifestyle have direct effects on the amounts of good and bad bacteria in our gut. Intestinal microflora can be adversely affected by stress, medications, poor diet, disease, aging, and a variety of other factors.
Probiotic bacteria require food to thrive and their preferred diet is dietary fiber. Fiber is a component of plant cell walls that lends form and structure to the plant. There exist many types of fiber and it’s primarily found in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, seeds, and nuts.
When probiotic organisms digest fiber, they produce acids that keep the pH of our gastrointestinal tract low (acidic). Beneficial bacteria thrive in an acid environment while harmful bacteria thrive under alkaline conditions.
People who eat mostly refined and processed foods with very little roughage sometimes suffer from bacterial dysbiosis - an under population of beneficial bacteria along with an overgrowth of harmful bacteria. Subsequently, health problems can ensue from an overpopulation of disease-promoting organisms.
Effect of Antibiotics
Beneficial bacteria produce antimicrobial compounds which inhibit the growth of harmful organisms and this helps to prevent diarrhea, infections, and other illnesses. During antibiotic therapy, we inadvertently kill off the good microbes in our body along with those that cause illness.
Both during and after antibiotic therapy, it’s a good idea to include probiotics in the diet to help keep the intestinal flora in balance and reduce antibiotic side effects like diarrhea. Additionally, the elimination of protective bacteria typically results in a weakening of immune response. This can lead to problems such as allergies which not infrequently triggers asthma.
Increasing Your Population of Good Bacteria
It’s not difficult to re-colonize the gastrointestinal tract or increase the population of beneficial bacteria with 1) dietary fiber and 2) probiotic supplements. Not all the probiotic organisms we consume will colonize in our digestive tract, but if we provide them with a good food supply, we increase their survival rates.
In addition to whole plant foods, there are many commercial fiber supplements available on the market, but consuming whole foods has two big advantages. First, you get several different types of fiber in any one food source as opposed to generally one or two in a supplement, plus you get all the protective nutrients so abundantly found in natural foods.
