Super Foods for a Super You: Part IV of V: Good Bacteria

This fourth part of my series on Super Foods for a Super You will deal with what is known as good bacteria or probiotics found in yoghurt as well as different dietary supplements that promote the digestion of foods in your body. I will here try to explain both the chemical role of incorporating good bacteria into your diet, as well as give a few personal tips on how you could promote a healthy bacterial flora in your body.

What is meant by good bacteria, or the so called probiotics? Probiotics, which means “for life”, is the beneficial bacteria already found in the human gut. The good bacteria play the crucial role of fighting the bad bacteria that enter our bodies through the digestive system as we are eating and drinking during the day. The types of bacteria in our bodies vary greatly, but simply we can say that good bacteria work to keep the bad bacteria at bay. In the long run this could mean prevention of inflammations and diseases such as Crohn’s disease, arthritis, and maybe even certain types of cancer. Lactic acid bacteria and bifidobacteria are the most common types of microbes used as probiotics. Both are found in the gastrointestinal tract as well as in the vagina, and make up a significant part of the human gut flora. Live cultures of lacto bacilli in yoghurt will not remain in your digestive tract unless you continue eating yoghurt regularly on a daily basis.

Apart from eating yoghurt with live culture of these bacteria, kefir makes up another good alternative. This is a fermented dairy drink which is sold with a variety of tastes, an absolute ideal source of probiotics – even for the lactose-intolerant person! Kefir is a lactose-free yoghurt which makes it optimal for anyone who wishes to include good bacteria in his or her diet. Kefir is also an energy booster and health promoter in the sense that it contains many nutritional elements (vitamins and minerals) such as calcium and magnesium, phosphorus, folic acid, B and K vitamins. Because there are naturally occurring sugars in kefir, this dairy product further supports and assists in the regulation of blood sugar in our bodies. In fact, just a few spoons per day could result in significant differences in blood sugar levels.

Thus, by eating the right products on a daily basis it is possible to affect the gut flora of bacteria in your body. Promoting an optimal bacterial flora is furthermore synonym with boosting your immune system and digestion process, and it involves a consideration of both prebiotics and probiotics in your daily diet. Prebiotics, as separated from probiotics, are the non-digestible food ingredients that stimulate the growth and activity of bacteria in the digestive system. Well-known, popular dietary sources of prebiotics include: soybeans, raw oats, unrefined barley or wheat, beans, seeds, spices, tea, vegetables, and nuts for instance. They are usually consisting of carbohydrates like oligosaccharides naturally found in fruits and whole grains. Also, many prebiotic oligosaccharides are increasingly added to foods for the sake of their health benefits: fructooligosaccharides, xylooligosaccharides, polydextrose, and galactooligosacchardies.

Be friendly with yourself and your body. Through your diet you have every possibility to create a healthy and balanced environment within yourself that will have significant effects on your well-being, both on an everyday life basis as well as throughout your life.