Did your doctor ever tell you to eat yogurt when you take antibiotics? Did you ever ask why?
It turns out that your gastrointestinal tract is naturally full of good bacteria that aid in digestion, fight off infection, and strengthen your immune system.
When you take an antibiotic for an infection, many of the good bacteria in your gut are killed off. Yogurt (some brands, not all) contains live bacteria that might help keep the gastrointestinal tract in balance, restoring the good bacteria, and lessening symptoms such as stomach upset and indigestion. Yogurt has long been recommended by doctors as a way to avoid uncomfortable symptoms during antibiotic treatment. But gaining in popularity is a new complementary therapy known as "probiotics" that many doctors and researchers now believe works much more effectively than yogurt.
Probiotics supplements are products that are apparently made up of large quantities of "good," live bacteria that can help restore the balance of the gastrointestinal tract in a number of medical conditions. Probiotics supplements usually contain a combination of live bacteria or a single type of bacteria. According to research, probiotics have successfully treated the symptoms of a variety of medical conditions including diarrhea caused by antibiotics, certain types of infectious diarrhea, and allergic colitis.
The Research
Ongoing research is revealing that probiotics might also be useful in conditions such as lactose intolerance, inflammatory bowel disease, food allergies, and childhood eczema. Only certain strains of bacteria have actually been studied, however. Which means that further research is needed to better understand how probiotics work and the benefits and risks of using them for specific medical conditions. Probiotics might cause adverse health effects for people whose immune system is severely compromised.
In addition to supplements, some foods – such as yogurt, milk, cheese, soy products, and certain fermented foods – might naturally contain probiotics. Some researchers question if these foods contain enough bacteria to be called a probiotic and to exert a healthy effect in the body.
Buyer Beware
You should never take probiotics supplements without supervision and recommendation by a physician. Many products that are called probiotics have never been proven scientifically to be helpful.
Research is ongoing in this field, so much so that regular use of probiotics to prevent and treat medical conditions might be a practice of the future. |
