Your GI tract is MUCH more than a digestion center; in fact, it is quite literally your second brain as well as being “home” to 80% of your immune system.
Your gut reside roughly 100 TRILLION living bacteria…That’s more than 10 times the number of cells you have in your entire body
Maintaining the ideal ratio of “good bacteria” (known as probiotics) to “bad bacteria” is now gaining recognition as perhaps the single most important step you can take to protect your health. More than 200 studies linking inadequate probiotic levels to more than 170 different health issues, including obesity and weight gain.
Advanced signs that your intestinal bacterial balance is beginning to spin out of control:
- Gas and bloating
- Constipation and/or diarrhea
- Acid reflux
- Skin problems
- Overall sickness
- Headaches
- Urinary tract infections
- Trouble sleeping
- An inability to lose weight
- Sugar cravings, especially for heavily refined carbs
You see, the ideal healthy ratio of “good” to “bad” bacteria is 85% to 15%, or 9 to 1.
Due to lifestyle and environmental factors, the vast majority of the population is severely lacking when it comes to good probiotic bacteria, throwing their gut flora ratio completely out of whack.
These lifestyle and environmental factors include, but are not limited to, exposure to:
- Sugar
- Artificial sweeteners of any kind (found in “diet” beverages and food items, chewing gum, and even toothpaste)
- Processed foods
- Chlorinated water
- Pollution
- Antacids
- Laxatives
- Alcoholic beverages
- Agricultural chemicals and pesticides, and…
- Antibiotics (from medications and/or antibiotics found in meat and dairy products that we ingest).
As you can see, unless you maintain a 100% organic diet, completely avoid all sugar, and lock yourself in the house in an attempt to only consume the purest of air 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it is almost certain that your gut flora balance is suffering, and will continue to suffer, unless you do something to proactively correct it on a daily basis.
With that said, it’s no wonder that research is now suggesting that supplementing with probiotics every single day is even MORE important to your health than taking a daily multi-vitamin.
PROBIOTICS indicating the “number of colony forming units” in a supplement is only necessary when the probiotics are freeze-dried and isolated strains that need vast numbers in order to try and do any job at all. A good analogy would be stating: “Vitamin C builds immunity, so therefore if I take 1 million milligrams daily I’ll never get sick”. It doesn’t work like that. The body needs only x amount of Vitamin C, but it also needs Vitamins A, B, D, E and K, protein, carbohydrates etc.
So a good spread of the correct nutrition is far more effective than high doses of one nutritional component. It’s the same with microbes – we need a vast range of natural microbes, doing a vast range of different things, rather than high doses of one or 2.
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