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If You Eat a Healthy Diet, Save Your Money Because You Don’t Need Probiotics and Prebiotics
Most otherwise healthy adults with a well-rounded diet do not need them based on personal experience and professional literature review.
It is an understatement to say the topic of probiotics is hot and trendy. A Google search produced 366,000,000 links. One in four people surveyed said they were taking them daily. Parents are giving them to their children, toddlers, and even pets.
Many good and bad bacteria live in our guts, and an enormous amount of research has been done linking them, known as gut microbiomes, to multiple diseases. Everything from inflammatory bowel disease to obesity and diabetes has been associated. Probiotics contain “good” bacteria to help colonize your gut. But if you eat healthy, do you need to take them?
The type of bacteria that live in our guts is called a microbiome. I like to think of it as a gut garden. It has been estimated that there are anywhere from 300–1000 distinct types of bacteria in our gut and over 100,000,000,000,000 (trillion) living bugs, both good and bad.
Considering these numbers, it is little wonder that researching how the microbiome affects individual disease causation versus…
