Dr. Roizen:
Hello, I’m Dr. Mike Roizen, founder of RealAge and co-author, along with Dr. Mehmet Oz of the YOU series of books, including YOU: The Owner’s Manual, YOU: On a Diet, YOU: Staying Young, and soon YOU: Being Beautiful. I’m also Chief Wellness Officer at the Cleveland Clinic.
You probably know that one of the main points we make in our YOU books is that even if you smoked, or had fried your brain with biscuits for breakfast every day, you get a do-over. Change a habit today, and in about three years it is as though you’ve done nothing but the healthy habit for your whole life. And that seems to be true whether you add walking or 600 mg of DHA-omega-3 or a probiotic to your choices. All of these I do daily and recommend to my patients. And we as a country seem to be doing well with one of these: Americans are now spending over $1 billion a year on probiotic products. But doing well may be an illusion, as surveys show that just 15 percent of us know what probiotics really are or what they do or how they can help you have a health “do over”.
In this PodCast, I’d like to provide the essence of an understanding of probiotics, including what they are, why you need them, and the benefits of using them. We’ll also discuss the different probiotics you can choose in the real world, why I think not all probiotics are created equal, and provide a look into the future in terms of what probiotics hold for you and potential new uses for them.
In a basic sense, you have a war inside your intestine between your good and your bad bacteria—in fact over 90% of the cells in your body are not yours. Probiotics are living bacteria that help you stack the war’s outcome in favor of good or health promoting bacteria. . Probiotics can be found either as tablets or capsules or in certain foods like yogurts. Eating bacteria may seem like a rather strange idea, because when we think of bacteria, we often think about the “bad” bacteria or “germs” that can make us sick – things like salmonella in under cooked chicken or bacterial infections. But you have and you rely on trillions and trillions of “good” bacteria to keep your digestive and immune systems functioning properly. However, the levels of these “good” bacteria can decline due to factors such as age, diet, stress, and even with the use of antibiotics. When this happens, you can run into digestive problems and your immune system can be weakened.
This is where probiotics really come in. Probiotics are reinforcements to restore the level of “good” bacteria in your body. That’s one of the reasons why a pharmacist or your physician may suggest taking probiotics or eating specific yogurts after taking a course of antibiotics.
Probiotics may be especially useful in helping improve symptoms of digestive disorders—you know things we often don’t talk about at cocktail parties—those feelings of gassiness and bloating and so irregular bowel movements that some days you think you can write or read a novel in the bathroom. But Mehmet and I believe health should be a no-embarrassment zone. One of the most common digestive disorders is irritable bowel syndrome or IBS for short. People with IBS suffer from abdominal pain and discomfort and have highly irregular even debilitating bowel patterns. Some of you probably feel you have to be near a bathroom and plan your day that way. IBS can often be triggered by things like diet and stress – the same things that can impact your levels of “good” bacteria. Because the natural system of “good” bacteria keeping the bad bacteria surrounded is altered in people with IBS, the benefits of probiotics in this area are well studied. Several clinical trials show probiotics reduce many symptoms of IBS.
Another benefit of probiotics demonstrated through multiple research studies is their ability to improve your immune system. Because “good” bacteria do a good job in making your gut less hospitable to “bad” bacteria, taking probiotics can help you reduce the likelihood of getting sick if you happen to eat “bad” bacteria. For example, probiotics can reduce what you may term “TOURISTA” traveler’s diarrhea caused by drinking contaminated water.
Another study showed that healthy people who took probiotics for 30 days had a much more robust immune response to viruses that cause upper-respiratory infections, such as the adenovirus and the flu virus and influenza A.
While less studied and also less serious, but as common for most of us, probiotics may also be helpful in minor gastrointestinal disorders like flatulence—that’s gas-- and lactose intolerance. That makes sense because probiotics can help digest carbohydrates in your large and small intestines, and incomplete digestion of carbohydrates is the most common cause of flatulence and lactose intolerance.
New research is just emerging that shows that probiotics change the products the bacteria in your bowel produce, helping to decrease your blood pressure, reducing inflammation in the most common forms of arthritis, and even improving mood disorders like depression, and not just because you do not have to find a bathroom so often. The long-held belief that probiotics may help your whole body is starting to prove itself true.
By this point, you might be ready to go out and look for probiotics to add to your daily routine. Interestingly, this simple act may be the most difficult aspect of probiotics to grasp—isn’t yogurt all around us? Not so fast. The important thing to remember is to provide benefits to you, probiotics must survive not only sitting on the shelf in your home and in the store, they must also make their way past the harsh stomach acids to reach your intestinal tract where they then must grow and thrive. Thus it isn’t the number contained in the pill or in the container, it’s the number that survive into your intestine—notice I said your.
Different strains of probiotics differ greatly in their abilities to do this. Most conventional forms of lactobacilli, found in many probiotic yogurt mixes, are inactivated by stomach acids, while Bifidobacteria, another popular strain found in some yogurts and supplements, is often inactivated by high heat. Bacillus coagulans, a probiotic that protects itself by developing its own protective shell is one of the most exciting strains of “good” bacteria to come around. Why? Because it can withstand extreme temperatures and the harsh acid in the stomach. Because of its unique ability to survive these conditions, bacillus coagulans is even being added into foods that were not otherwise possibilities, like baked goods and dry soup mixes. Those are in addition to the normal supplements that bacillus coagulans can be found in.
The bottom line and the most important thing we want you to remember is that we believe using probiotics is a choice that you can do easily everyday to improve your health, whether you have digestive disorders or are healthy but just want to keep your digestive and immune systems working as well as possible, for as long as possible. Or as we say a probiotic a day keeps your RealAge younger.
Thank you for listening to this first PodCast in this series developed to provide helpful information about probiotics and their benefits to you for living a healthier lifestyle. This is Dr. Michael Roizen.
TAG: YOU HAVE JUST LISTENED TO A PODCAST ON PROBIOTICS FEATURING DR. MICHAEL ROIZEN. THIS PODCAST WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MAKERS OF DIGESTIVE ADVANTAGE AND SUSTENEX. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THESE PRODUCTS OR PROBIOTICS IN GENERAL, PLEASE VISIT WWW.DIGESTIVEADVANTAGE.COM OR WWW.SUSTENEX.COM. THAT’S S-U-S-T-E-N-E-X.COM.
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