The health and wellness industry promotes many products, some of which are tremendously helpful and effective. Having said that, the industry also puts many products that don’t live up to their exaggerated claims on the market. To put it another way, there is no such thing as a magic pill or silver bullet product put out by the health and wellness industry.
If there’s anything close to it, though, it’s probiotic supplements.
You need to understand a few things about your own body chemistry to realize the benefits of probiotics. The first thing that you should know is that your body consists of 89% bacteria and 11% human cells. So you are essentially an enormous mass of bacteria that has formed into a human body.
Both good bacteria and bad bacteria reside within you. You are constantly replenishing good bacteria in your body. It’s crucial to understand the basics about good bacteria in the digestive system. This good digestive system bacteria has a profound effect on your overall health, including your chemistry and your immune system.
Good bacteria protect you by destroying pathogens—your bad bacteria: Bad bacteria also live in your body and if given the chance would multiply, make you sick, and even eventually destroy you. Good bacteria play a vital role in relaying information from one position in your body to another. They have a network of chemical communication systems that pass on vital information to both your consciousness and your chemistry.
This data exchange goes both ways. The thoughts that you keep and your consciousness itself can communicate with good bacteria in your body. The communications can determine whether or not the bacteria live and populate, die, or be too low in numbers to be effective.
If we lived in the Garden of Eden in paradise here on this earth, we would only eat the purest foods, drink the cleanest water, and inhale the purest air. We would never have exposure to antibiotics and never have exposure to pollution, pesticides, and other environmental toxins. And we would likely never really be stressed out about things the way we are in the present day. If that were the case, the balance of good bacteria in our body would remain perfect.
In fact, if we were eating foods from the Garden of Eden we would be eating foods that fed the good bacteria in our body. We would be eating the food that the good bacteria needed to continue to live, and through those foods we would actually be taking in more good bacteria. That would be the case because bacteria comes from other living organisms.
The first place where you encounter friendly bacteria is when you pass through the birth canal. Good bacteria is present in the mother’s fluids inside the placenta. Her native bacteria that are friendly get into your eyes, into your mouth, into your ears, and onto your skin.
Once you come out of the mother’s body, your digestive system is no longer virtually sterile—it’s now populated with friendly bacteria. You feed this friendly bacteria by drinking mother’s milk, which is the perfect food for you as a newborn. It’s perfect not only for your muscle growth and energy, but also to feed the immune system (which is completely dependent on the good bacteria being present in the digestive system).
This dependency on good bacteria will be the case for the rest of our lives.
The first way to restore order to the populations of good bacteria in our bodies is to eliminate our own dietary and lifestyle mistakes. When we do so, we allow the body to do what it’s naturally designed to do. Unfortunately, for some people this might not be enough. In such cases, probiotics of high quality can be of tremendous help in restoring the crucial proper balance of the body’s good bacteria.
Not all probiotic supplements are created equally, though. The consumer is almost always in the dark when it comes to understanding which probiotic supplement is the most effective. One assumption we can make is that if it’s already classified a probiotic by the FDA, then it’s likely that that bacteria strain has been used for a long enough period of time to generally be considered safe. The problem is that it’s up for debate which of the hundreds of different strains of probiotic bacteria are the most effective.
Probiotics are great dietary supplements that can contribute very significantly to overall health and wellness. But buyers should “do their homework” in order to make informed decisions about which such products to use.