Probiotics
How Probiotics Help You Lose Weight
Probiotics seem to be getting a lot more attention in recent years due to an increase awareness of ‘beneficial bacteria’. These bacteria can improve your immune function and overall digestive health and wellbeing. You can add probiotics to your diet by taking supplements or eating fermented foods, such as yogurt with live active cultures, soy drinks, kimchi, sauerkraut to name just a few. But are they guaranteed to help with weight loss?!
What are probiotics?
Probiotics are live bacteria and yeasts that are beneficial to your health and wellbeing, more specifically your digestive system relies on a strong probiotic state. The word bacteria often leads us to imagine something negative or something that causes ill health, however our bodies are full of both good and bad bacteria. It’s widely regarded that Probiotics are the ‘good, helpful or beneficial’ bacteria due to their contribution to keeping your gut and digestive system in a healthy state.
How Do They Work?
Probiotics are naturally found in your body; however you can top these up by including certain foods and supplements into your diet. Since the 1990s the understanding of probiotic function has increased dramatically, and because of the their supportive properties to digestive health you can now them in all sorts of food ranges from yoghurts, drinks, tablets, even chocolate.
They work in a supplementary fashion themselves, for example if you have a low count of ‘good’ bacteria in you system probiotics can help to replace this loss and increase this count. Probiotics also act as a balancing role between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria to help maintain proper and regular function of your gut and digestive systems.
Do probiotics help with Weight Loss?
Interestingly a study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition in June 2010 found that drinking about 7 ounces per day of fermented milk containing a type of probiotic called Lactobacillus gasseri may help with weight loss and decreasing abdominal fat. A more recent study, published in the British Journal of Nutrition in April 2014 found that supplements of another probiotic, Lactobaccilus rhamnosus, appear to help obese women lose weight and body fat when combined with a reduced-calorie diet. The women receiving the supplements lost about twice as much weight over the two-year study period as women who followed the same diet without taking the supplements.
But, why? Probiotics contain a variety of key nutrients that help you stay fit, well and healthy. Probiotics can help you lose weight, researchers suggest probiotics may help you slim down and reduce appetite because they make your intestinal walls less permeable and penetrable. As a result, fewer molecules that may contribute to obesity are able to enter your bloodstream. To benefit from these weight management effects it can be suggested to eat more probiotic rich food such as yoghurt and of course following a healthy diet that’s low in fat and high in protein.
Try adding probiotics to your diet and encourage the maintenance of healthy gut flora, this being a key element to achieving a health weight and size. One indicator of an unhealthy gut or poor digestive system is the increase of body fat and a poor body metabolism. In addition, the intake of foods high in sugar and unhealthy fat fuel the growth of bad bacteria which ultimately counter act the good bacteria in your diet. These same kinds of unhealthy ‘bad bacteria’ foods play a very large role in initial weight gain and body fat increase. Therefore besides eating foods high in ‘good bacteria’ you should also avoid eating those that encourage the increase of a bad bacteria count.
Louise and Richard Thomas founders of Fresh Start
Something we often discuss as Fresh Start boot camp is the ability to change and develop nutritional intake to match your health and fitness lifestyle. You will learn the importance of probiotics and how to include them in your diet when you attend our boot camp holiday in Chiang Mai Thailand. At our boot camp holiday in Chiang Mai we promote making small changes such as adjusting nutritional intake as well as a solid training plan to help set and reach goals.
Reference
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v64/n6/full/ejcn201019a.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24299712
