What Are Probiotics?
If you’re a frequent eater of yogurt, you probably have seen many of the yogurt companies talk about how their yogurt contains “probiotic formulas” or simple, Probiotics. They claim to help your digestive system through what seems like a secret formula, but it’s actually quite basic and simple (and good for you).
As you probably know, you have good and bad bacteria in your digestive tract. The good stuff helps your body digest food and extract nutrients from those foods. The bad stuff doesn’t and often causes discomfort, bloating, and other bad side effects. Stress, medicine, and other factors can often impede your body’s ability to manage the bad bacteria and they may start to grow in number (this is bad!).
Enter Probiotics, these are products that contain that good bacteria and you can think of them as “good bacteria” supplements. The current definition, by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, is that probiotics are “Live microorganisms which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host.”
If you want to get technical, lactic acid bacteria is the most common type of microbe used and it offers numerous positive properties, especially for yogurt products. LAB is able to convert sugars such as lactose into lactic acid. What this does is that it lowers the pH of around it and helps combat spoilage in yogurt and the incidence of “bad” bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract. The two most popular strains used as Probiotics are Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium.
Lastly, nutritionists and doctors often recommend probiotics to patients after taking antibiotics, which have a habit of killing a lot of bacteria, good and bad, in digestive tract.
1 Trackback(s)