anybody had good results w/ probiotics?
 

Hi,
I've been reading stories in the news lately about probiotics being helpful for women in weight loss. A couple of different sources, but this was one of them-- Probiotics for Weight Loss | Women's Health Magazine.

I bought a probiotic daily supplement which includes a spectrum of several of the live cultures found in probiotics (local supplement store- refrigerator case) and am going to try this in addition to my daily routine of drinking water, working out, eating more frequently, etc, and see if it will help me get any better results.

I was just curious if this was something anyone here had tried and if so- which probiotic supplement did you use?

Is eating yogurt not enough?

i didn't know much about that. i only do exercise and take some nutritional food. but i will go through that.

Probiotics
 

Hi,

Thought you might be interested to know that there is a BBC documentary series called The Truth About Food and one of the episodes (I forget which but there are only six and all are on YouTube) talks about probiotics. They claim that eating certain foods that are beneficial to the naturally occurring good bacteria in your gut actually results in higher levels of the good bacteria than supplementing the good bacteria your body has with added probiotics. So you might be ahead to just eat these foods, or at least include them : onions, garlic, leeks, asparagus and bananas. The whole series is very interesting if you like learning about nutrition. :)

thanks! i will check it out!

Eating fermented foods also helps your good bacteria too ie sauerkraut etc. What I've learned about probiotics though is they mainly help digestion and prevent heartburn. People only understand heartburn from a very simplistic point of view acid reflux = heartburn = must get tums to combat the acid etc.

When you have heartburn, 99% of the time it's caused by candida, a condition of too many bad bacteria in your gut often caused from drinking alcohol or having a high carb sugary diet, your digestion slows and gets backed up causing heartburn. Since your good bacteria, otherwise known as gut flora, has the job of processing/digesting your food when you wipe them out with a bad diet, you can't digest food properly and it starts backing up causing heartburn. Probiotics help replace the bacteria we need to get things going, digestion-wise and moves food quickly through your body down through the other end.

Heartburn can also be caused by taking antibiotics which kill your own natural gut flora. If probiotics are used while on antibiotics you'd almost never experience heartburn, thrush, bladder infections, urinary tract infections, all of the ails sometimes caused by taking antibiotics.

I don't believe they'd help you lose weight unless you're chronically backed up from eating a high carb/high sugar diet. If used like this, probiotics are more of a band-aid solution. It'd be much better and less expensive to clean up your diet than keep buying priobiotics to deal with a bad diet and health related problems.

Yogurt contains maybe at best 2 different types of bacteria so for someone struggling with candida or antibiotics wiping out their gut flora, no, this isn't a great solution. It's a good thing to have now and then in your diet but watch out, 90% of the yogurts on the market are more sugar and carbs than protein and probiotics (a good quality yogurt has more protein content than carb content, check the ingredients before you buy).