How Probiotics Help the Body and Brain

Probiotics: How they help the body and the brain, why some of us need them more than others, why it’s good to alternate, two of my favorites, and why I don’t recommend refrigerated probiotics. 

Pro means good, biotics means bugs, so it’s good bugs that are the warriors fighting your battles for you. Probiotics are the reason humans have such a big brain, bigger than just about any other animal is because of probiotics.  The good bacteria in our gut and throughout our body does a lot of work for us.  The good bacteria in our gut digests our food and makes lots of good things for the brain.  

Everybody has a mix of good and bad bugs. The gut has its microbiome, the mix between good and bad. Your lungs have a mix of good and bad, thus when I talked about vitamin D and COVID-19, it actually changes the microbiome of the lungs. 

Your dominant hand has a different microbiome than your non-dominant hand.  The back of your hand has a different microbiome than the palm of your hand. Your pits have a different one than your face, your eyes, and your ears. Everybody’s got their own mix of good and bad bugs. So ideally you want to keep all the good ones and keep the bad ones to a minimum so that we get all these guys doing the work for us, fighting our battles for us and none of the bad bugs trying to take us down.

Now there’s a lot of things that mess up the mix.

Being born preterm or c-section instead of a vaginal delivery.  Kids that are born c-section have the same bugs that seed their guts as the microbiome of the lamps in the delivery room and the skin of the delivery nurses, and that’s definitely not the kind of microbiome you want to start with. If you’re not breastfed you’re only bottle-fed your microbiomes can be disrupted. Early use of antibiotics, using antibodies before the first year of age the worst is 0 to 3 months, then 3 to 6 months, then 6 to 12 months at those kinds of ages, even one dose of an antibiotic can disrupt your microbiome in your gut and the microbiomes all through your body, don’t even need a full seven-day course. When you get a lot of antibiotics going as a kid and then later you’re taking Motrin, Advil, then birth control pills, alcohol, and then stress, all disrupt the microbiome.

So what you want to do is re-establish the microbiome in your gut and a really nice way to re-establish it is with probiotics.

Now there’s a couple of ones that I like a lot, there are other ones that aren’t so good.  One of the ones that aren’t so good are actually the ones you have to keep in the refrigerator, because as soon as you take them out the temperature change is dramatic enough that so many of them die. 

One of the probiotics I love is called MegaSpore. MegaSpore is what they call a spore-based probiotic, where live bacteria have a very challenging time getting past the acidic stomach.  We have a lot of hydrochloric acid in the stomach and a lot of them die so if you’re using a non-spore based probiotic you have to use one with a whole lot of bugs, hopefully enough get past the low pH of the stomach to get to the intestine and then grow and flourish. 

The MegaSpore (spore-based) probiotic gets past any undesirable area, and will not open up until it gets to a desirable area. It’s kind of like a spore vs. a seed.  For example, with a seed, if you’re in a desert it would be too hot, it would be too dry for the seed to survive. But a spore could sit in that desert for 70 years, waiting for the 1 in 70 years rain, then bloom.  The spore is able to get past the low pH of the stomach, gets into our intestine, bloom big-time, and it has like a domino effect, where all the other types of good bacteria bloom with it, and you get this huge “up with the good, down with the bad” experience. 

Now, the second one I like, because it’s good to alternate every 3 months, you don’t want to over-grow any particular kind, but a mix, is from a company called NuMedica and they have one called HiFlora, 50 different strains, 12 different varieties. A really lovely live bacterial strain that I find really works well.  

It’s good to alternate probiotics about every three months, to optimize your microbiome.  As mentioned in that vitamin D, that COVID-19 related post, when you change the microbiome in the gut, you’re actually shifting inflammation, getting rid of inflammation all throughout the system, including you’re shifting the microbiome in other body parts.

If you can shift the bugs in the right way and get rid of the bad bugs, your health is so much better including keeping away heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, all these kinds of things. 

I suggest you read my blog posts called “Vitamin D Does it Again”, about how shifting the microbiome in the gut; people with inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, and even celiac disease has a profound impact on the rest of the body.  This really puts you in a position, especially when you combine it with things like exercise, managing stress well, eating well and now you shift your microbiome optimally with probiotics, you can have a big impact on your health. 

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