Brenda Skidmore's Health Tips

Healthy Edge Advantages Of Adding Probiotics And Prebiotics To Your Diet:
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Fermented foods and beverages have played an important role in human diets in many different cultures throughout the world for generations. First and foremost it was used as a food preservation tool before the advent of modern-day cold storage methods.

Recently, within the last decade, modern nutritional research science is revealing just how important these type of foods, and their active related bacterial ingredients, really are to human digestive health. As with nearly anything else, and despite what food manufacturers will try to, conveniently, mass market mainly for taste, homemade is almost always best. And, homemade fermented food and beverages are no exception. From yogurt to kefir, sauerkraut, and many possible others, you will surely find something that suits your taste. Besides, learning how to make your own at home is not hard, time consuming, or expensive at all, and it can really be quite fun in keeping an old food preservation method alive. Involve your whole family, even kids love learning something new.

Our knowledge of these health enhancing germs, which are present in fermented foods and beverages, is definitely increasing. Most everyone already knows that frequently eating a popular dairy food product, yogurt, can provide the digestive tract with beneficial bacterial flora. As mentioned earlier, you will have to look beyond supermarket store varieties. Most, if not all, are sweetened with sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Questionable too, is how much bacterial nutrition remains after pasteurization kills off, if not all, lactic acid producing bacteria.

Researchers are now discovering that a healthy population of good bacteria in the gut may also enhance nutrient absorption. Another study revealed that this type of nutrition increases blood levels of several B vitamins. And yet, two other investigations, one using only lactobacillis, the other using lactobacillis and bifidobacterium (both of which are found in yogurt) are associated with higher blood consentration levels of antioxidants.

What these last two investigations seem to suggest, is that adding a combination of probiotics (such as lactobacillis, bifidobacterium, and several others) with prebiotics may help lower the risks, or improve outcomes, of already established oxidative stress diseases like hardening of the arteries, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, liver disease, and other diseases associated with inflammation.

Fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) are classified as prebiotics. They are short and medium chains of fructose, a commonly occurring form of natural sugar found in most unprocessed plant foods like garlic, onions, bananas, nuts, and honey. They have the ability to selectively promote the growth of healthy intestinal bacteria flora by feeding its survival.

Another added benefit pf prebiotics are they also enhance the absorption of calcium, possibly magnesium as well, by lowering the risk of osteoporosis, suppresses the activity of cancer causing enzymes in the large bowel lowering the risk of colon cancer, and lowers blood triglyceride levels by regulating blood sugar spikes. Plus, cultivating healthy bacteria in the intestinal tract like bifidobacterium, which produces lactic acids, helps inhibit the over growth of pathogenic bacterial germs that can cause illnesses.

In conclusion then, it would seem like a rather wise, and obvious, idea to add fermented foods, with their wide variety of beneficial bacteria, to an already healthy food diet plan, along with bacterial growth stimulating whole plant food sugar substances. Combine them with any daily added vitamin/mineral supplements. Why not get as much bang for your bucks as you possibly can, by putting in a little extra nutritional effort that will help your body better assimilate the investment you may be making in buying quality nutritional food supplements?