The Gut-Brain-Skin Connection: Probiotics Food

Probiotics are live bacteria and yeasts that are beneficial for your health, especially your digestive system. Now, based on the Gut-Brain-Skin theory, we know that probiotics are also good for your skin and your mind.  So how does probiotics work?  Probiotics are usually ingested as food products.  The live bacteria and yeasts in the food would go into our digestive system, stay, multiply and therefore correct or improve the impaired gut microbiota population. 

I am not a big fan of probiotics in a pill (meaning supplements).  The reason is that supplements space in this country is only weakly regulated by FDA and many products simply don’t have enough research to support the efficacy.  Therefore, in this blog, I will focus the discussion on probiotics food.

The only thing that you need to remember about probiotics food is that anything fermented will be a good probiotics for you.  The first probiotics food popped into your mind mostly likely is yogurt. 

Correct!  Yogurt is generally recognized as the number one probiotics food.  However, not all yogurts are created equal.  You should always pick the ones with “live culture” stated in the label.  I tend to stay with plain yogurt with only a few essential ingredients listed on the label such as milk, cream and live culture.  If you must have the flavored one, try to pick out ones with minimal amount of additional ingredients.  The thickening ingredients such as dextrose, gum, artificial flavor and artificial coloring simply don’t belong in such a healthy food.  If you must flavor up your yogurt, by all means, add cream, add honey and add fruit.

Another thing about yogurt is that different yogurt products tend to have different types or blends of bacteria.  This means that their effect as a probiotics food differs.  For example, Stokes and Pillsbury suggested that Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium are two “good” bacteria whose reduction in gut would leads to problems.  Therefore, you probably should try to pick a yogurt product with these two strains in the live culture.

So how do the yogurt products differ in their probiotics composition? According to the Dairy Reporter, the top four yogurt brands in the United States include: Yoplait, Chobani, Stonyfield and Dannon.  Other brands that are also popular include: Fage Total Greek Yogurt, Greek Gods Yogurt, La Yogurt and Voskos Greek Yogurt.  The table below provides information about the species/strains used to produce each product.

YOGURT BRANDS	BACTERIA STRAINS
Yoplait	Lactobacillus bulgaricus Streptococcus thermophilus sometimes: Lactobacillus acidophilus
Chobani	Lactobacillus acidophilus Bifidobacterium bifidum Lactobacillus casei
Stonyfield Farms	Lactobacillus bulgaricus Streptococcus thermophilus Lactobacillus acidophilus Bifidobacterium bifidum sometimes Lactobacillus rhamnosus
Dannon	Lactobacillus bulgaricus Streptococcus thermophilus sometimes: Lactobacillus acidophilus Bifidobacterium lactis DN-173 010 in Activia Lactobacillus casei DN-114- 001 in DanActive
Yakult	Lactobacillus casei Shirota
Fage	Lactobacillus bulgaricus Streptococcus thermophilus Lactobacillus acidophilus Bifidobacterium bifidum Lactobacillus casei
Greek Gods Yogurt	Lactobacillus bulgaricus Streptococcus thermophilus Lactobacillus acidophilus Bifidobacterium bifidum Lactobacillus casei
La Yogurt	Lactobacillus bulgaricus Streptococcus thermophilus Lactobacillus acidophilus Bifidobacterium bifidum Lactobacillus casei Bifidobacterium animalis BB12
Voskos Greek Yogurt	Lactobacillus bulgaricus Streptococcus thermophilus Lactobacillus acidophilus Bifidobacterium bifidum Lactobacillus casei

If you watch commercial at all, you will see one of these Dannon ads on Activia.  Activia contains a special strain, Bifidobacterium lactis DN-173 010, which, according to some researches, seem to alleviate constipation and other intestinal inflammation related symptoms.  DanActive, another Dannon product, contains Lactobacillus casei DN-114 001, which showed some activity against diarrhea.  If you have any of these symptoms, you might want to give these products a try.  Personally, I don’t like Dannon products—they are formulated too sweet for me.  After balancing the sugar content and the benefit of the special strain in their products, my gut went against sugar.

Besides yogurt, there is a lot more fermented food you should explore.  The ones coming into the mind are fermented vegetable such as kimchee and pickles, fermented beans such as miso and fermented soy, fermented rice (my favorite breakfast), fermented tofu (you can only get it in Asian stores), cheese and, yes, unfiltered beer!   The varieties are so huge that you should be able to incorporate a probiotics food in every aspect of your diet.

Thanks for reading.

Connie

connie@cherruby.com