Probiotics for Health
Probiotics for Health By S.K. Dash, Ph.D.
Many health-conscious consumers today want to know when they should take probiotics. They ask whether they should wait until they are sick. If so, they ask, which illnesses respond best to probiotics? Or should they take a preventive approach and take probiotics before they get sick? What about use of probiotics with antibiotics? Today, there is no doubt that taking probiotics is as essential as a multivitamin to your health. So my reply to such questions is that a daily supplement should always be taken to maintain healthy immune and digestive function — but the supplement amount should be increased during times of stress and illness. But let’s start at the beginning.
Probiotics — What Are They?
The concept of ingesting live microorganisms for the purpose of improving one’s intestinal health and general well being can be traced back well before the beginning of the Twentieth Century to earlier eras when most foods were nonrefrigerated and instead preserved with fermentation. But the current practice of using beneficial organisms to improve and sustain health is now referred to as probiotic supplementation. Although numerous types of bacteria (and yeasts) are currently being marketed as probiotic cultures throughout the world, the two most commonly used ones are Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium.
Probiotics — A Health Essential?
Consumers rarely consider how essential healthy bacterial populations are to their health. But the fact is that a healthy ratio of beneficial to pathogenic bacteria residing within the gastrointestinal tract is essential to good health and influences not only digestive health but also immune function, detoxification, and women’s vaginal health. Unfortunately, great numbers of people today no longer have optimally balanced ratios of beneficial to pathogenic bacteria in their body, thus allowing the “”bad guys”" to gain the upper hand. This is very dangerous and one of the reasons that digestive illnesses, as well as other types of illnesses, are becoming so prevalent. Medically prescribed antibiotic use is certainly one of the most important causes of this change in our natural flora, with travel to foreign lands a close second. But beyond these detrimental impacts on our gastrointestinal health, we face many other daunting challenges to our bacterial balance. Unless one consumes organic dairy products, for example, one is almost certainly consuming traces of antibiotics and sulfa drugs, which have a disruptive effect on bowel ecology. Our highly processed food supply has also denied our bodies the opportunity to ingest beneficial bacteria as we once did through food fermentation (widely used before refrigeration). Our water also tends to be highly chlorinated which, although important from a public health perspective, has drawbacks for individual health when it comes to adversely impacting our body’s bacterial populations. When the body’s bacterial populations are upset, many kinds of illness can result. So for daily maintenance and in times of illness it just makes sense to use a quality probiotic formula.
Prevention and Treatment of Diarrhea and Constipation: Antibiotic-associated diarrhea can be attributed in part to imbalances in intestinal microflora. Bifidobacteria have been used to successfully treat intestinal disorders and in the prevention of rotaviral diarrhea in children and adults. In fact, taking a probiotic formula with antibiotics is now considered to be standard medicine in many countries. But antibiotics and probiotics must be taken a few hours apart. Constipation is a significant problem for many people, especially the elderly. Researchers have shown that enhancing Bifidobacteria in the large intestine of constipated elderly individuals provides a significant laxative effect.
Ulcer Therapy: If you’re taking antibiotics to treat your ulcer, you should be using probiotics along with your doctor’s prescribed antibiotics. That’s the message from researchers reporting in the February 2001 issue of Digestion. Frequently, nausea, bloating, diarrhea, taste disturbances and loss of appetite are side effects from use of antibiotics to eradicate Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium thought to be the causative agent in gastric ulcers. This latest study involving 120 ulcer patients shows that persons given both antibiotics and probiotics experienced markedly reduced incidence of bloating, diarrhea and taste disturbances compared to persons given only antibiotics, and most persons given the natural remedy experienced no side effects.
Enhanced Immune Function: Most of our immune cells are produced within the gastrointestinal tract and much of our protection against orally ingested pathogens (such as salmonella) is the result of a healthy gastrointestinal environment. There is perhaps no greater protection against such food-borne pathogens than the use of probiotics to sustain this healthy environment. Recent studies show that Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria can stimulate both general immunity and also specific antibodies to certain pathogens.
Lactose Intolerance: Dairy foods are a very important part of a healthy diet, but many of us suffer from some symptoms of lactose intolerance. Studies have shown that strains of Lactobaccilli and Bifidobacteria reduce symptoms of lactose malabsorption.
Establishment of Healthy Flora: in Babies and Infants Premature infants generally take longer to establish a characteristic intestinal flora, which can render them more susceptible to certain intestinal infections. Various strains of Bifidobacterium administered to premature infants results in populations of beneficial bacteria becoming established more quickly in their intestines compared to a control group. You will also likely find that children susceptible to middle ear infections enjoy better health when they are given probiotics (DDS®-Junior Probiotic for Children).
Editor’s Note: Dr. S. K. Dash is among the world’s leading experts today in the field of probiotics. Dr. Dash is founder of America’s leading probiotic company UAS Labs.
See the full unabridged version of this article at www.freedompressonline.com.
References Armuzzi, A., et al. “”Effect of Lactobacillus GG supplementation on antibiotic-associated gastrointestinal side effects during Helicobacter pylori eradication therapy: a pilot study.”" Digestion, 2001;63:1
Brain Cell Growth Boosted By DHEA Supplements
‘Anti-aging’ hormone DHEA Found to Boost Brain Cell Growth August 24, 2004
Human neural stem cells, exposed in a lab dish to the steroid DHEA, exhibit a remarkable uptick in growth rates, suggesting that the hormone may play a role in helping the brain produce new cells, according to a new study published this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The new work, conducted by a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides some of the first direct evidence of the biological effects of DHEA on the human nervous system, according to Clive Svendsen, the study’s senior author and an authority on brain stem cells at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center.
“What we saw was that DHEA significantly increased the division of the cells,” said Svendsen, a UW-Madison professor of anatomy and neurology. “It also increased the number of neurons produced by the stem cells, prompting increased neurogenesis of cells in culture.”
DHEA or dehydroepiandrosterone is among the most abundant naturally occurring steroids in the blood of young humans, but levels decline with age and its physiological effects are poorly understood.
A synthetic form of the hormone is sold over-the-counter as a dietary supplement in the US, thought to have anti-aging properties and to offer prevention against cancer and heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other diseases. But scientists know relatively little about the drug and its basic biological effects on humans.
“We don’t know much about DHEA, but this new work adds a piece to the puzzle,” said Svendsen, who conducted the study with colleagues Masatoshi Suzuki, Lynda S. Wright, Padma Marwah and Henry A. Lardy, all of UW-Madison. “This is the first real evidence of DHEA’s effects on human neural cells.”
Svendsen and Suzuki carried out the experiments by growing human fetal neural stem cells in culture. The cells form aggregates known as ‘neurospheres,’ which were exposed to a cocktail of DHEA and growth and inhibitory factors, and observed a 29 per cent increase in new brain cells compared to cells grown in a medium with the same factors, but without DHEA.
“We saw such a pure effect of DHEA,” Svendsen said.
“It’s the only steroid we tested that had such a direct effect on stem cell growth and new neuron formation,” according to Suzuki.
The new work is important because it provides a direct window to the controversial hormone’s effects on critical human cells. Similar studies have been conducted in mice and rats, but those models have shortcomings that are difficult to address, Svendsen notes.
“There are previous studies in rats that suggest DHEA is neuroprotective, but the problem with DHEA in rats is that it is not a major metabolite in that animal so its effects may not be the same as those seen in humans,” he said. According to Lardy, metabolic products of DHEA hormone have also been shown to aid memory retention in old mice.
Despite hints from the studies in rodents that DHEA may play a role in enhancing the brain and memory, the new findings reported in the PNAS article were a surprise, he said.
“We assumed the compounds we were testing would be more active than DHEA in brain stem cells,” Lardy explains. In previous studies, Lardy, with Wisconsin biochemistry colleagues James Ntambi and Brian Fox, showed that DHEA blocked a step in fat synthesis.
“The effects of DHEA on brain stem cells is a completely new finding,” said Lardy. “The problem of whether DHEA itself is having this effect, or if there’s another metabolite of the hormone involved, still exists.”
One of the intriguing aspects of the new work, according to Svendsen, is the possibility that DHEA could have some positive effects on the adult human brain.
It is known that DHEA amounts fall progressively during aging, and reduced levels of DHEA have been reported in both adolescents and adults with major depressive disorders. And given the fact that adult humans have neural stem cells that continue to make new neurons in some parts of the brain, there is a possibility that DHEA could play a role in moderating the genesis of new brain cells.