Status and gut instincts. The top 2 secret survival tactics.
Probiotics 101: the quick and easy guide to understanding the basics.
The source of bacteria needed for a healthy gut (biodome) are probiotics. You hear this word used all the time because it is the hot, new, trendy buzzword when it comes to selling you packaged food. There are many probiotic bacteria that we want to colonize in our guts, lactobacillus and bifidobacteria are the most common and well known ones. From healthline.com, here are 6 more and their jobs in our bodies:
Here are six common strains of probiotics that you’ll find on food and supplement labels.
B. animalis: This strain is an ingredient in Dannon yogurt’s Activia product. It’s helpful in aiding digestion and fighting food-borne bacteria. It’s also thought to boost your immune system.
B. breve: This strain lives in your digestive tract and in the vagina. In both places, it fights off infection-causing bacteria, or yeast. It helps your body absorb nutrients by fermenting sugars. It also breaks down plant fiber to make it digestible.
B. lactis: This is derived from raw milk. It’s an ingredient in Nestle’s probiotic infant formula, called Good Start Natural Cultures. It also serves as a starter for:
- buttermilk
- cottage cheese
- other cheeses
B. longum: This strain lives in your gastrointestinal tract. It helps break down carbohydrates and also can be an antioxidant.
L. acidophilus: This strain is found in the small intestine and in the vagina. It helps digestion and may help fight off vaginal bacteria. You can find it in yogurt and fermented soy products, such as miso.
L. reuteri: This strain is found in the intestine and mouth. One study showed that it decreased the oral bacteria that cause tooth decay. It’s also thought to help the digestive system.
When reaching for yogurt or probiotic fortified food products, the key words you are looking for on the label are “CONTAINS LIVE AND ACTIVE CULTURES” in the ingredient list. If they can actually list the probiotic bacteria, even better.
Here’s a secret for you though. There’s an even easier, cheaper and better way to get your belly full of probiotic goodness that will also help you lose weight, lower your cholesterol, improve your cognitive function, memory and mood and many other things short of replacing your Viagara or progesterone supplements.
The gut-brain connection. How it works and how to fix it here.
The secret that food manufacturers don’t want you to know
Everything you need to get all those probiotics in your system, you can make at home with the slightest home economics 101 skills. Fermentation and nature are your friends, and here is why.
Probiotics are the fully formed bacteria that we want to keep alive and plentiful in our guts. PRE-biotics (prebiotics) are the raw materials that our gut can use to make those probiotics when we aren’t feeding them to it.
Including both will be a powerhouse combination that will do more amazing things for your body and health over the long term than you can imagine – and all for less cost and effort than making a decent cup of coffee or tea.
Kimchee, natto, sauerkraut, pickled watermelon rind, kombucha… Korea, Japan, Germany, Russia, Manchuria … nearly every culture from around the globe has old world recipes for pickled or fermented foods in their cuisines. We assumed it was the old world way of storing and keeping foods for lean farming seasons times and hard times but it appears that there are more complex and health sustaining benefits to these “poor folks cupboard stock items” than we give them credit for. If you can pickle or ferment it, you can make probiotics from it. Mother Nature loves you and this one of the many ways she shows you how much.
Shopping list or secret to your success during hard times list?
If you are food budgeting OR simply dealing with excessive stress that you have no control over, do yourself a huge favor and start including larger amounts of fermented foods and prebiotic plants into your diet. If you want to supplement using pre-packaged foods from the store or capsule forms of probiotics, by all means take advantage of the fact that they exist and you can afford them. Do not let your budget tell you that you can’t have probiotics in your diet though because the cheapest, most organic source is going be hand made, by you in your own kitchen for pennies.
Results are slow and gradual for most folks so don’t expect to feel like a superhero instantly. The improvements will be there and typically, only if you were extremely depleted in probiotics will a nearly immediate and visible improvement start showing. Stress is temporary but good health – physical and mental is long term if you take care of them. Probiotics address both sides of that combination so stop starving yourself at a buffet of goodness that Mother Nature has designed for you.
Your gut instinct is on the mark talking to you so listen to it. And remember, when it comes to hierarchy and status in groups, the people who have the least value anywhere else in their lives will fight the hardest to be at the top of that power pyramid. They will also cause everyone around the most stress in the process.
P.S. Did you know that baboons will harass each other out of sheer boredom specifically to stress other baboons to death?
Keep your probiotic levels up so you can keep the damage from your stress levels down. The end result is that when all this changes or passes (and it will) and they are struggling to become healthy while fighting to remain relevant in changing power dynamics that is now causing THEM overwhelming stress…. well, your gorgeous, radiant ass will be swinging out the door like the happy camper you are and were meant to be, for all the right reasons.
Critical stress is temporary but good health – physical and mental is long term, if you take care of them. There is no emergency management when YOU are the emergency. Probiotics. Nature’s silver bullet against werewolves and stress inducing baboons.
Other Stress Management Options
- Is all this making you wish you could get a massage right now? Click here for a safe option.
- Still in a touch free zone? I can help you with that too. Click here for touch free options.
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