Greetings.
Eric Bakker.
Good to be back.
Going to talk about another topic.
A subscriber here has asked me, can you please talk about the pros and cons of prebiotics?
I can certainly do that.
In fact, I wrote a whole webpage on the topic, and I'll put the links to that down below
to that particular page, but I'm also going to put down the food sources of prebiotics.
So you don't actually have to get this as a supplement, and it's far better off that
you actually chew and eat those foods containing these sugars.
It's far better for your colon.
Research has shown you're going to get really good production of short chain fatty acids
which I've spoken about in previous videos.
The chewing's important rather than the swallowing of the pills.
I've been in this business a long time.
Long before this prebiotic sort of name came out.
There's a guy called Marcel Roberfroid who in 1995, coined the phrase "prebiotic".
What Dr. Roberfroid found out is there were certain types of sugars, particularly what
we call oligosaccharides, different types of sugars.
These actually go through the gut and change.
They don't get digested, so when they get to the colon, they ferment and they feed the
good bacteria or the probiotics.
The prebiotics feed the probiotics through bacterial fermentation.
You can read about this on Wikipedia or different sites and things like that.
I remember when Roberfroid came out with this research.
It wasn't really about supplements.
It was about food, and it was about he discovered these sugars and their amazing effect on the
beneficial bacteria.
This really led to a lot of research in the probiotic realm, which today probiotics are
everything.
When I first started to recommend probiotic supplements in the '80s, people thought I
was nuts.
They couldn't really see the benefit.
They said, "Just have a bowl of yogurt."
They had no real understanding of the powerful nature of probiotic bacteria.
Let's look at the sugars.
We've got monosaccharides.
We've got oligosaccharides.
We've got polysaccharides.
Polysaccharides tend to be starches or very undigestible kind of foods.
These are basically sugars, no different from white sugar, it's just their bonds change
them to be more long and elongated and more complex, so it's more difficult for the body
to break these sugars down.
Therefore, to act on them and then create the same kind of energy reaction out of that
than you would out of, say, a teaspoon of white sugar.
A piece of sweet potato compared to a teaspoon of white sugar, you can see the difference.
One will have an immediate action on the body.
One will have a delayed action on the body in terms of its digestibility and stimulation
produces energy in the body.
The starchy foods, the polysaccharides, are also quite good for the gut.
But it's the oligosaccharides that really have a tremendous good effect.
They tend to be sweet by nature.
For example, the onions and the leeks and garlics and these sorts of foods.
Our Jerusalem artichoke, chicory root, they have a sweetish kind of taste.
That's the sugary kind of effect that you can really feel that.
Now in America, if you're say, in California watching this right now or in the state particularly,
you'll be consuming, if you're lucky between one or two maybe three grams a day of these
sugars.
But if you live in certain parts of Europe, you'd be consuming 10 grams or more.
If you live in Africa, you could be consuming way more, like 10 times as much.
Depending on the type of foods you eat.
If you're eating minimally processed food, a lot of natural food like I do, you'll be
getting lots and lots of these sugars into your body which means you'll be getting trillions
of beneficial bacteria as a result.
I've did a bit of research when it comes to particularly fructo-oligosaccharides, FOS
and inulin, and I didn't like a lot of the research I found.
But what initially happened in my practice when I started to recommend supplements like
Threelac and like Syntol, and there are many other ones out there, I noticed that an increasing
stream of phone calls to my clinic on dissatisfied patients, people that were talking about bloating
and gas and diarrhea and headaches and feeling sick.
I thought it was die off until I stopped using these supplements completely and then just
gave probiotics on their own, and I found a far better result with people.
Even better when I included enzymes, enzymatic supplements.
I would give those, and then I would also give probiotics.
This eventually led me to producing the CanXida Restore product which is completely free from
these prebiotic sugars.
I found research linking prebiotic sugars also to the stimulation and overgrowth of
Klebsiella bacteria, linked with autoimmune disease.
I also found research linking prebiotic sugars in supplements to candida overgrowth.
I immediately stopped using prebiotics years ago, and I haven't used them since.
Now they may be okay for you, but for the majority of people I've worked with, the chronically
sick people, they're not okay.
They created untoward gut reactions, and it really didn't suite me in the clinic to have
a busy practice and have lots and lots of dissatisfied people initially calling, and
then later with computer technology, emailing and emailing.
So I got sick of it.
I realized that the prebiotics were often unpinning this aggravation.
So that's the con in my opinion.
It's not good for people with a very sick gut.
People have this fallacious belief that if you pile lots of fermented and cultured foods
in the gut, sauerkraut and yogurt and all this other stuff, and then take prebiotics
on top and probiotics, it's too much.
Stick with the food, people.
Stick with the food.
Food should be medicine, and there are a lot of good choices you can make when it comes
to the prebiotic foods.
Particularly the allium family, which are one of my favorite groups.
The brassicas and the allium contain high amounts of these natural occurring sugars
in them which ferment beautifully in the colon, making for great health.
But the great thing about the allium family also is they're proven to have effects on
keeping the blood thin, reducing blood pressure, stimulating immunity, improving the mood.
There are many different elements to these foods that are far and beyond the prebiotic
sugar nature.
Foods are fantastically good foods to eat to confer great health to the body.
Instead of taking some synthesized sugar from some factory calling it a prebiotic, you want
to think carefully about doing that.
Now probiotics are entirely different.
They're actually bacteria.
They're not sugars.
If you are going to eat sugars, eat natural sugars like I do.
I mean look at this beautiful jar of honey that I got here.
This nice jar here.
These are from my beehive.
This is the sort of sugars that I like to have in my diet.
The natural sugars, not the artificial sugars.Brassicas also confer incredibly good benefits to your
health, not just in terms of the sugars and starches that you can build good bacteria
on, but because of their many protective nutrients that they include in them that help to prevent
things like cancer and many immune, different diseases.
Adzuki beans, pinto beans, navy beans, green tea, raw cacao, asparagus, beetroot, green
beans all very healthy foods.
The con and the pro, it's quite interesting.
There are pros with prebiotics, but in my opinion those pros come from eating foods
that contain those things rather than supplements, which is a con in my opinion, because they
can stimulate the production of untoward bacteria and yeast in your body, which you don't really
want.
It's actually not really a good idea, I believe, to take prebiotic sugars.
More and more, I'm finding supplements containing them and they've been artificially synthesized,
so I'd probably be aware of these kind of sugars.
I can see them going down the same route as a lot of these artificial sweeteners that
we're using now in soft drinks which have been linked with stroke.
So I believe down in time, if someone watches this video in 50 years from now, "That guy
was right.
I was eating my probiotics for years containing this and now look what I've got."
Just be careful because artificial sweetening agents have proven now to show increased effects
when it comes to dementia and even stroke.
A ton of research out there now, but when they were first released, they were meant
to be the be all, end all.
They were going to stop people getting fat and sick and they were going to just cure
a lot of diseases.
Now we're seeing the opposite.
I would be very cautious when it comes to prebiotics and supplements in general.
Thanks for tuning in.