Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired? Prebiotics and Probiotics Are What You Need

Hormonal changes that naturally occur after 40 years of age can wreak havoc on your body. As if that weren’t enough, there is a myriad of other issues associated with maturing. And they start cropping up like uninvited party guests. Solution? Fortify your body systems with prebiotics and probiotics.

Aches and pains springing out of the unfamiliar realms of your own body… The never-ending quest for better grey coverage… Existential crisis…..

You need powerful allies to counter midlife’s disappointments.

So…

Today, we look at something that will support your wellbeing so that you can tackle those intrusive party crashers.

Meet your twin little helpers – probiotics and prebiotics.

Well-being gurus and wizards as well as medical practitioners sing praises about probiotics and prebiotics.

Curious as to why?

Don’t worry. You are about to find out what the difference is, and how to get these into your system.

To start with, here’s a quick rundown on the difference between prebiotics and probiotics. Including a quick overview on how choosing the right foods can work miracles for your gut health.

What Is the Difference Between Prebiotics and Probiotics And How To Get Them

What Are Prebiotics

Simply put, prebiotics is foods that contain high fiber. When you eat fiber-rich foods, the gut flora that lives in you then partially breaks down and eats this fiber. The fiber is also in the parts of plants that you can’t eat. Like the fiber in the skins of certain fruits and vegetables. Such as carrots, bananas, and berries.

Once in your system, prebiotics can help feed and propagate the bacteria that live in your intestines.

Does the idea of feeding these tiny creatures make you feel a little unsettled? Well, there is a good reason for their existence. So it’s important to keep them alive and well, and help them to reproduce more easily.

Why Prebiotics Are Important For Your Health

Prebiotics has a pivotal role in your system. This is because they provide the fiber that cleanses your digestive system after feeding your microflora.

This microflora is essential because they are responsible for a variety of processes that take place in your body.

Firstly, the nutrients, vitamins, and minerals are stripped from your food. Then the remaining fiber will travel through your intestines. As it travels, it will catch the difficult particles that can form a plaque around the inside of your intestines.

If this plaque isn’t removed, you could develop serious health issues. And that can make difficult, painful, and embarrassing hospital intervention a necessary part of your future.

How to Get More Prebiotics in Your Diet

To begin with, below is a list of foods we know to be prebiotic. After you learn what these are, you can start to increase the level of prebiotics in your meals. Or you can complement the real thing with high-quality supplements.

Prebiotics Include Raw Additions of:

• Asparagus – Asparagus is a great prebiotic. Because of its multifaceted skin and fibrous texture, it acts as en efficient scrub. To eat it, you can slice the asparagus lengthwise and cut it into sections. You could also simply cut it into coins as thinly as possible and top with a salad.

• Onions – If you slice an onion into very thin slices, they are great on sandwiches. Dice them up and add them to tomatoes with a seasoning for a lovely salad topping. Or use them freshly chopped in a dip for chips and other snacks. They also boost immune functions.

• Garlic – This amazing and tasty anti-inflammatory is great for mincing into all sorts of food. Add raw minced garlic to meat, sauces, salad dressings, and more. It fights infections.

• Apples – Apples are still one of the most nutritious foods you can carry with you. The skin of apples contains vitamins and prebiotics. Slice them up, or eat them whole.

• Jerusalem Artichokes – You can boil, mash or roaste them. But you don’t always have to cook them. You can easily cut them into thin slices and make a simple salad. They’re best with oil and vinegar types of dressings.

What Are Probiotics?

Probiotics are live, microscopic organisms that live naturally in fermented foods. Ideally, you get them through the food that you consume. However, there are some really potent quality supplements you can buy for your convenience.

Two of the most common strain of bacteria found in healthy probiotic drinks and foods are bifidobacteria and lactobacilli. Store-bought probiotic foods will usually mention on the label what types of live cultures they contain.

When looking for probiotic sources, it’s also important to try and cultivate diversity in your gut. That will make your insides stay happy and balanced. 

Why Probiotics Are Important For Your Health

Probiotics are essential for human life. They control and facilitate many of the processes that take place in your body. Some of the processes they handle can even affect how well your brain works.

Without them, it would be impossible for you to break down many types of foods properly. So unless you want to end up with digestion issues and medicate with pharmaceutical liquid solutions, you’ll need to keep their populations as robust as possible.

In addition to their importance as sustenance, probiotics are critical because they keep a delicate balance in your gut. They play a vital role in controlling the balance between their own populations and invading bacteria. The invading bacteria serve other purposes but could become harmful if they become too numerous.

In today’s modern world, food production methods, refrigeration, and the use of certain chemicals have caused a lot of problems for gut flora in humans. Some foods even contain drugs that can kill the majority of your gut flora all at once.

How to Get More Probiotics in Your Diet

To see some real changes in your microbiome, it’s necessary to increase the number of probiotics that you consume. So here’s a short list of foods you can add to your diet to get more of the probiotics.

Easily Accessible Probiotic Foods:

• Kombucha – This drink is really just fermented tea that contains the bacteria. It comes in a variety of flavors and you can make it yourself. It’s great as a beverage during all meals of the day, and you can use it to help your digestion.

• Yogurt – This dairy product is definitely one the most versatile probiotics on this list. Rich in live cultures, it has the ability to protect your from heavy metal exposure. You can also flavour it as you like!

• Kefir – Is a drink made from a variety of both animal and plant sources such as milk, cheese, coconut, soy, or rice. It has yeasts beneficial for our body, as well as many of the essential bacteria needed to process certain foods.

Good vs Bad Bacteria

According to the American Nutrition Association, your body needs to have about 85% good bacteria and 15% bad bacteria within your gut for things to operate properly.

When the normal balance of bacteria tips too far in one direction, a health issue will likely appear eventually. The bad bacteria will always be around. You’ll never get rid of those. Instead, focus on eating things that feed your good bacteria to grow their populations.

What Can Harm the Good Bacteria (This Is Why You Need Prebiotics and Probiotics To Protect Them)

Antibiotic Overuse

One of the most dangerous issues today is the rampant and unchecked use of antibiotics in your food. These drugs are completely indiscriminate in the strains that they kill. They can completely destroy the living cultures that reside in your gut.

Artificial Sweeteners and Preservatives

Sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose can change the way that your gut flora behaves. The same can be said of preservatives. Studies have found evidence that they could be causing metabolic issues that aren’t fully understood by modern medical science.

How Lack of Prebiotics and Probiotics Affects Health

There are at least four common ways in which the balance of your gut flora affects your health.

Nutrition

Keeping track of your eating habits is important because what you eat affects your gut flora. Your gut flora needs to contain healthy bacteria so that you get the nutrients necessary to live. These bacterial microorganisms are the ones responsible for making the nutrients biologically accessible to you.

When your gut flora isn’t healthy, it’s a lot harder for you to digest food. And that causes difficulty for the food to pass through your digestive tract properly and in a timely manner.

It also means the proper delivery of nutrients to your organs is blocked. And if your body doesn’t receive nutrients, your immune system is compromised. You become vulnerable to invasion from other bacteria that can become harmful.

Inflammation and Infectious Disease

When the proper components of nutrition aren’t present in your body, your gut flora will send warning signs. These warning signs will let you know that things need to be corrected.

When you don’t have enough antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents from food in your body, and your gut flora can’t control the populations of bad bacteria in your system, you are likely to experience a lot of inflammation.

For some, it could start as joint soreness, or swelling around the face and neck. Inflammation is normally the first signal for these kinds of deficiencies. The good thing to do would be to get some of the probiotics that also have anti-inflammatory properties.

Your Mood and Sleep Patterns

Science is beginning to detect that there is a much greater relationship between food and mood than ever realized before. When you don’t have a healthy gut, hormones that should normally be transmitted might not even be in production.

This can cause a drop in important hormones like serotonin. Those effects would undoubtedly manifest as a negative gloom that you experience throughout your day. Some studies have even been able to improve mood using live cultures in food.

Skin Health

Skin is the largest organ of your body. Therefore, it’s likely to show outward appearances of health decline. Balanced gut flora produces healthy, glowing skin. On the other hand, people with poor digestive health often look older and have a tired appearance.

In conclusion, probiotics and prebiotics are a legendary duo, abounding in amazing benefits. If you can do just one thing when it comes to your personal health care, try to incorporate at least some foods containing them into your diet.

@Feature Photo by Aphiwat chuangchoem from Pexels

Disclaimer:

This article was written by Zuzana Halliwell. I am not a doctor or health professional and cannot be held liable for the information written here. This article is meant to provide information about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. The content is based on my own personal experience and on information provided by medical professionals that is available to the public. It is not intended to provide medical advice. Do not use it as an alternative to seeking help from a medical professional.