Do probiotics work? What do you need to know to not waste your money? Let me
explain. Hi I am doctor Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly
master health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you
subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. There's
a lot to talk about probiotics and yogurt and supplements and things like
that for the for the bacterial culture in your gut but there's also a lot of
confusion so I'm gonna explain some basics so that if you take them that you
don't waste your money so first of all what is a probiotic Pro is something
that is for and bio is something that has to do with life so these are things
that support life and the life we're talking about is your biome
the bacterial culture in your gut so you have roughly 40 trillion cells in your
body and you have roughly the same number of bacteria in your gut according
to some new calculations probiotics are supposed to support the
beneficial balance of your gut flora so what makes them beneficial the first
thing that they do is that they most of them secrete lactic acid lactobacillus
acidophilus it eats lactose and it produces lactic acid and most of those
beneficial bacteria they produce some form of organic acid that lowers the pH
because everything that happens in the large intestine needs to be slightly
acidic and the bad bacteria don't like it when it's slightly acidic so that's a
huge component of maintaining balance down there number two they support the
barrier so if you've heard of leaky gut that's when the barrier loses its
integrity when it gets leaky when it gets little holes in it so the
beneficial bacteria helps support the integrity it strengthens that barrier
to avoid leaky gut and allergies and so forth third it helps with immune
modulation you have the majority of your immune system is in the gut and the
presence of enough healthy bacteria helps support and balance that immune
system the expression of that immune system for it outcompetes the bad
bacteria so when we call them good and bad bacteria that's not even the whole
truth because nothing is bad as long as it's in a certain balance so even the
stuff that we call bad they have certain beneficial functions they produce some
good stuff they produce some vitamins they help with some good things the time
that they become bad is when they grow out of proportion so one of the most
important things that beneficial bacteria do is they out-compete they
compete for the food resources and they compete for the physical space and as
long as we have a vast majority of good bacteria then the bad bacteria aren't
really bad at all so it's all about balance but where does it go wrong
there's something called dysbiosis and that's when the condition when the
balance has gotten out of hand that basically means unbalanced in that
bacterial life system and there's three things that cause that problem above all
others the first is antibiotics because it indiscriminately kills off bacteria
and then when we eat sugar starch and processed foods we tend to feed the bad
the opportunistic bacteria selectively so first we kill off most of everything
and then we feed the bad ones and now we have chaos and a war zone down there and
the third part is stress because when we have stress we activate the sympathetic
nervous system which you can check out this video on sympathetic versus
parasympathetic and when we activate sympathetic we suppress the
parasympathetic and everything to do with gut health is governed by the
parasympathetic nervous system so everything from stomach acid to enzymes
to peristalsis it's all controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system which
is suppressed by stress so these three things which the vast majority of people
do on a regular basis is why dysbiosis is almost the norm these days then
people hear ok my gut is messed up let me take some probiotics that's a good
thing right well maybe maybe not the idea of
probiotics is that they're basically seeds that you take seeds and you're
looking to seed your internal garden but the question is do you have good soil in
the garden or do you have something that looks more like a paved over parking lot
because there's no amount of seed that you throw in a parking lot that's gonna
result in any growth and that's the whole idea you're throwing down the
probiotic seeds and hoping that they'll take seed in the good soil and reproduce
and maintain that culture because it's not about eating probiotics all the time
to out-compete the bad guys it's about regrowing a healthy
environment you can never eat enough probiotics to out-compete anything it's
all about regrowing that culture so this makes it a little
bit of a catch-22 because if you're healthy already then you're maintaining
the balance and you don't need probiotics but if you're unhealthy and
you really need the probiotics then they do you no good because then they're not
going to seed and they're not going to result in a healthy culture so the main
thing to understand about these guys they're all good they can assist the
body in regrowing but we really have to focus much much more on developing that
healthy environment by not taking antibiotics by cutting out the sugar
starch and the processed foods by and then we start to develop the healthy
lifestyle habits which is about everything that we talked about in
videos about health and it's about getting enough sleep
it's about meditating it's about getting exercise because all this manages and
balances every aspect of your body more specifically though what you can do for
your gut is you want to start eating whole food not processed foods you want
to eat lots of vegetables vegetable fiber not brand fiber not from grains
vegetable raw vegetable fiber so make smoothies and salads and things like
that you also want to start trying to introduce some fermented food like
sauerkraut like yogurt like kombucha and because anything that is fermented has
those bacteria but they're already in a growth medium that that can support
their growth so it's a more dependable way of restoring that flora and then is
a good time to start checking and seeing if you need some probiotics so it's not
a super easy thing you can try them and you can see how you feel and if you got
improves but a lot of people don't really know and what we do in our office
we test for these things with muscle testing so people bring in their
probiotics and we have our own probiotics that we sell because I'm all
for them when it's the right time but very rarely when people really have a an
upset system very rarely do they actually test where we very rarely do
they actually work so we're not going to be in a hurry to to sell people anything
when we test and they don't work then we know we have to wait we have to do some
other things first so most people don't test for them and then we have to start
restoring the other functions we have to get them some digestive enzymes we have
to give them some breathing and relaxation exercises we have to make
sure that the liver and the gallbladder are working we have to make sure that
the pancreas is working we have to make sure that they don't have too much of a
leaky gut so there's all different ways of supporting each and every one of
those and then when they start working better now we have cultivated the soil a
little bit to where they might actually test and benefit from these so they can
be great assistance along the way but very often they don't work so well in
the beginning so if you do take them there is really no harm there are very
few side effects the worst that could happen is you take a bunch of them and
you get some gas or some loading or some constipation or diarrhea but there's
nothing really damaging about it if you take them I would suggest you take them
on an empty stomach because a lot of them they're they're alive and if you
eat a big steak and your stomach turns into an acid VAT which it's supposed to
then it's going to kill every one of those bacteria there's can be a rare
bacteria a probiotic make it through that acid whereas if you eat it up take
him on an empty stomach then a larger percentage is gonna make it through and
you may waste your money it might do some good or you might just be flushing
your money down the toilet so what I would suggest is find some qualified
help to help you figure these things out and maybe get tested we use what's
called nutrition response testing and if you look that up there's you could maybe
find a nutrition response testing practitioner in your area and that in my
mind would be the best way to figure out how to go about this so they can be very
beneficial but a lot of times they are a waste of money so I hope this
information was helpful in understanding some of this and maybe help you toward
your next step and if you're new to this channel make sure that you subscribe and
hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. Thanks for listening.