Kefir Health Benefits – Why Probiotics?

Probiotics are foods that encourage the life and growth of good bacteria within your body! This may sound alarming, but it is absolutely essential to your survival. There are bacteria at work in your intestines right now that you cannot do without.

The bacteria in kefir have been shown to be able to add to the number of helpful bacteria in the human digestive system. This is excellent, because helpful bacteria such as the ones in kefir grains are proven to be able to suppress the growth of harmful bacteria.

These helpful bacteria stop bad bacteria from causing damage to your digestive system, improve digestive disorders, aid digestion, absorb toxins from the food we eat, boost our immune system and improve our energy levels. By doing all this, they can improve the quality of our skin (even if we have acne) by protecting us from the toxins in our body that cause bad skin to occur. They can improve and greatly reduce digestive problems and can even prevent allergies from developing!

Allergies sometimes develop when bad bacteria cause the intestines to “leak” large food particles into the blood stream. The immune system reacts to the food, treating it as a threat and creating an allergy. If the intestines are kept in good condition, this is unlikely to happen.

One of the most useful kefir health benefits is that, as a probiotic, it directly counteracts some of the effects of a stressful lifestyle! People under stress tend to suffer a dip in their immune function (which can lead to illness – as often occurs as a result of stress). They tend to experience hindered digestion, and sometimes diarrhea. By fortifying the immune system and making digestion easier, the bacteria in probiotic foods cushion the body’s systems against the effects of a stressful lifestyle. It doesn’t make stress harmless, but it may help to minimise the damage!

If you have recently been suffering with an illness that has required treatment with antibiotics, probiotic foods may help you to recover from taking the medicine too. Although you may not realise it, antibiotics are not well-targeted. Although they will tend to destroy whatever bad microbe is causing you illness, a lot of good bacteria will be destroyed too. This can leave the body vulnerable to a second attack by pathogens (disease-causing microbes such as bacteria and viruses).

The clue is in the name! Anti-biotics are against (anti) living things (biotics), while probiotics are the opposite. Using a probiotic to recover from antibiotics will safeguard your body – and in particular your digestive system – against attack by bad bacteria when your defences are weakened.

To find out more about how the whole family can benefit from probiotics, maybe you’d like to take a look at Kefir Health Benefits: Kefir for the whole family.