Not All Bacteria Are Bad: This One Will See You Through the Flu Season!

Photo credit: bigstock

You should seriously consider consuming more probiotics, especially if you have taken some antibiotics in the past few months. Antibiotics tend to be vastly over-prescribed. Many doctors simply want patients to be happy, so they give out antibiotics for just about anything, including viruses, the sniffles, and more recently, even Ebola, even when they know they won’t be effective. Read more how to restore digestion after antibiotics.

A study done in China, which involved three to five year old children who were treated with two types of probiotics, found that the kids had a 63 percent reduction in the number of fevers, a 54 percent in the number of coughs they had, as a 44 percent lower rate of runny noses. Antibiotic use was also down an impressive 80 percent for the kids who took probiotics because their symptoms only lasted about half as long as the group that did not take probiotics.

All of those anti-bacterial soaps and anti-bacterial wipes and cleaners have many people mistakenly believing that all bacteria are bad, and this simply isn’t true! (Find out more about hand sanitizers). Our digestive system has about 4 pounds of healthy bacteria that help kill off the bad bacteria that enter our bodies each and every day. Our digestive system bacteria can get out of whack, however, by things such as antibiotics, stress, over-exposure to toxins, and a poor diet. There is tons of evidence that shows that replenishing your body with probiotics, the good bacteria that we need to fight off bugs such as cold and flu viruses, can improve not only your digestion, but your immune system as well.

Eat plenty of foods and drinks that contain probiotics including yogurt, buttermilk, kefir, miso, and tempeh. Or you can always buy supplements at your local health food store.

References:

PrevPage: 2 of 2Next