Nutrition
"Probiotics" - from the Greek, meaning "for life" the term medically referred to as a group of "friendly bacteria" or "microflora". Trillions of bacteria and other microbes inhabit our digestive tract making it possible to digest food, absorb nutrients, and fight off infections and disease. Without microflora our entire digestive system would collapse after eating a piece of fruit that hadn't been properly washed. Intestinal microflora make it possible to fight off toxic bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella and pass waste matter efficiently throughout the body and ultimately regulate how healthy our immune system. Without sufficient microflora available, the nutrients we consume would virtually pass through us leaving us starving.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FRIENDLY BACTERIA
Excerpts from Dr. Ben Kim
One of the most important steps that you can take to improve your health, regardless of your current situation and health challenges, is to make sure that your intestines have plenty of friendly bacteria.
Friendly bacteria in your gut do the following:
· Stimulate the production of antibodies in your blood, increasing your immune system strength and capacity to deal with toxins, allergens, harmful microorganisms, and incompletely digested protein. [70% of your immune system is in your gut.]
· Produce nutrients that are essential to your health like Vitamin B12 and Vitamin K.
· Take up space and resources in your gut, which helps to prevent infection by harmful bacteria, fungi, and parasites.
· Produce natural antibiotics, acids, and hydrogen peroxide, which also help to protect you against infection by harmful microorganisms, including bacteria that can cause food poisoning.
· Help to digest food.
Friendly bacteria are great helpers to the lining of your digestive passageway in preventing harmful substances and microorganisms in the food you eat and the air that you breathe from getting into your blood and causing damage to your organs.
Having a large population of friendly bacteria in the digestive passageway has been shown to do the following:
· Reduce & eliminate acne, eczema, psoriasis, food allergy-related hives, & other skin conditions.
· Provide lasting protection against asthma
· Significantly increase the strength of the immune system
· Reduce or eliminate seasonal allergies like hay fever
· Improve digestion and normalize bowel movements
· Provide protection against food allergies, eliminating joint pain, nasal congestion, snoring, ear infections, skin rashes…
[When probiotics were given to people 63-84 years old, they had an increase in T-lymphocyte cells and a stronger immune response, there was a 32-35% increase in killing tumor cells and cancer within 2-3 weeks, and inflammation (leading cause of heart disease) was reduced by 50%.]
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You must supplement if you are not regularly gardening and hiking in the woods, which are two of the best ways of exposing yourself to friendly bacteria. Also, if any of the following statements apply to you:
• Use of antibiotics without a life-threatening or limb-threatening situation
• Regular consumption of alcohol
• Use of foods that are contaminated with antibiotics, mainly factory farmed animal food
• Use of laxatives
• Eating food and beverages that have sugar or other concentrated sweeteners
• Not chewing your food until liquid
• Not learning to manage stress
• Drinking chlorinated water
• Swimming in chlorinated pools
PLEASE NOTE:
Tons of antibiotics are fed to American livestock on a daily basis, purportedly to proof them against bacteria.
This practice not only contributes to antibiotic resistance in humans who ingest these meats—many experts feel weight gain, not disease prevention, is the real reason antibiotics are so widely used. Fat cattle sell for more than thin cattle. That’s all very well, but imagine what the antibiotics present in dairy products could be doing to our health and that of our children's.
