Being obese can limit and shorten your life. Eating a diet that feeds your body and keeps the bacteria in your gut in a healthy balance can make it easier to avoid gaining weight.
While the research is in the early stages, there are indications that a focus on healthy bacterial balance in the gut can make weight loss easier to manage and maintain.
Types of Probiotic Bacteria
The bacteria in your gut fall into two categories. Firmicutes and bacteroidetes are the two families of bacteria that you want to keep in balance for best gut health and to prevent weight gain, which can happen when these two bacterial families are out of balance.
Current studies indicate that people who are currently obese have more firmicutes and a lower population of bacteroidetes than people who are not currently obese. While these results are not conclusive, they do offer those struggling to lose weight hope.
How to Use Probiotics?
A probiotic supplement can be used if your gut is severely out of balance, such as if you have recently taken a course of antibiotics.
While antibiotics can kill infection, they can also harm the flora and fauna of your digestive tract, so take care to avoid antibiotics unless you must use them.
To get the best use of your probiotic supplement, consider also adding prebiotics to your diet. Make sure that you are getting plenty of raw produce, particularly onions and radishes. Garlic is another terrific prebiotic, as are whole grains.
Probiotics that Help Maintain a Healthy Weight
There are indications that lactobacillus gasseri, found in fermented milk products, can help with weight loss. However, if your diet does not support a healthy variety of the weight loss probiotics that can do you the most good, supplementation may not be the best answer.
Strive to Stay in Balance
A balanced diet is the best way to promote a healthy gut. It is critically important that you
- Incorporate whole grains, from wheat to oats to brown rice
- Eat raw produce, at least once or twice daily and preferably with each meal
- Incorporate some fermented foods into your diet
Sauerkraut on a sandwich made of whole grains is a win, as it contains both prebiotics in the grains and probiotics in the sauerkraut. Yogurt with active cultures bought plain and loaded up with raw berries is another terrific option.
Do your best to stay away from sugars and sugars substitutes. Artificial sweeteners provide no benefit to your body or to the organisms that live in your gut.
A diet high in sugar and refined flour will feed one bacteria more than another, knocking your gut bacteria balance out of whack and boosting inflammation within your body.
There is no cure all or fix as far as a probiotic supplement, though there are indications that a supplement of the lactobacillus or bifidobacterium strain could help you restart a gut that is badly out of balance.
In addition to your supplements, make sure that you are eating foods that will equally feed the more than 100 trillion microbes that live in your gut.
