Eat a billion bacteria daily for better health!
FOODS CONTAINING PROBIOTICS CAN COMPLEMENT AND, IN SOME CASES, EVEN REPLACE MEDICINE.
NEW DELHI: Food is comforting, it can be a heady gastronomical experience, and many traditional systems of medicine believe various foods can help prevent and cure disease.
Now, new research is confirming that foods containing probiotics — healthenhancing live micro-organisms such as bacteria and yeasts — and prebiotics — non-digestible plant fibres that promote the growth of probiotics —can complement and, in some cases, even replace medicine. Gut microbiota, the collection of symbiotic micro-organisms in our digestive tract, is known to play a crucial role in our digestive health, and is implicated in a range of diseases including asthma and diabetes.
And pre- and probiotics-rich foods and supplements help maintain an optimal ecology of such micro-organisms, which offers a wide range of health benefits.
An April 2016 study published in Minerva Urologica e Nefrologica says chronic kidney disease patients who took prebiotic and probiotic supplements thrice daily for six months, in addition to a low protein diet, maintained their estimated glomerular filtration rate — a desirable kidney function indicator — at more than three times the level of those taking a low protein diet alone.
“This would slow the progression of chronic kidney disease, which typically ends in end-stage renal disease, necessitating periodical dialysis and shortening the lifespan,” said Pavan Malleshappa, from Adichunchanagiri Institute of Medical Sciences, Karnataka.
This study has important implications for India, where chronic kidney disease was the eighth-leading cause of death in 2015, according to a Global Burden of Disease study. The benefits of pre- and probiotics are even more remarkable in fighting diarrhoea, a leading public health challenge in India that claims the lives of 13 children below five years every hour, or 328 children every day.
Probiotics can favourably impact high cholesterol and insulin resistance -- precursors of heart disease and diabetes, respectively, which the Global Burden of Disease study ranked as the top and seventh cause of death in India.