The Bacteria You Want in Food

ANAHEIM, Calif.—“Take your vitamins.” You’ve heard this phrase since you were a kid. Maybe as an adult you’ve added fish oil to the take-it list. But have you considered daily probiotics? These “good” or gut-friendly bacteria—yes, bacteria—might just be the most important supplement of all to boost your immunity, heal disease and even recent research findings suggest, prevent cancer.

And all that especially applies to fussy babies and vulnerable older adults.

Probiotics was a top-three buzzword on the show floor of the natural products industry’s premier trade show, Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim that just concluded Sunday.

Some sample buzz: Two retailers and a manufacturer engage in a thoughtful discussion about the benefits of taking a probiotic supplement versus drinking it through the fermented drink kombucha. Well, the kombucha manufacturer clarifies, to the disappointment of all, that kombucha is not a probiotic, rather it contains acids that help you digest your food all the way through your stomach. He says probiotics, taken in supplement form, make it past your stomach and prove more helpful for your intestines and entire digestive tract.

Several editors, meeting for an end-of-day glass of wine, discuss a new probiotics chocolate bar called Attune, that says on its label “more than 5 times the live active cultures in yogurt.”

Still, yogurt is not to be overlooked. Oikos, an especially creamy and low-sugar blend of Greek-style yogurt was debuted at the show by Stonyfield Farm. The new product has four live active cultures, including lacidophilus and bifidus. And another company is rolling out a brand-new yogurt drink for kids with added probiotics.

Across the show floor, Udo Erasmus, a Ph.D, nutritionist and product formulator for the Flora Health company, says research supports the need for age-specific blends of probiotics that address deficiencies such as colic in babies and constipation in seniors.

And all of us are likely to be curious about what Erasmus sees as a fast-approaching oral health breakthrough: “The most interesting thing is if you brush your teeth with the appropriate probiotic, but you don’t rinse it off before you go to sleep, you will wake up in the morning with exponentially better breath.”

Good bacteria, bad bacteria: Why can’t we get along?

This improved breath or less turbulent gut all starts with bacteria, of all things. The relationship between the good and bad bacteria in your gut, or in your mouth, is vital to your health. Five years ago few doctors would have believed in probiotics. Now a growing number of physicians are suggesting that patients eat more foods with live cultures or probiotics, such as yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut and miso soup. 

Inside your small and large intestines there are 400 to 500 different species of bacteria that live in synergy, as long as the good bacteria outweigh the bad bacteria. If the balance gets upset and the bad becomes more prevalent, you can develop many symptoms and sicknesses. The most immediate effects are excess gas, bloating and diarrhea. A worse-case scenario would be what happens when you have food poisoning. Your body reacts violently to expel the bad bacteria.

The two main families of friendly flora are lactobacillus, needed in the small intestine, and bifidobacterium, needed in the large intestine. Within these families are species and within that, strains. The flora in each person’s intestines vary as distinctly as their fingerprint, says Marc Lalonde, vice president of Harmonium International, a natural product supplier. So it is important to look for a variety of probiotics to make sure you re-supply whatever deficit exists in your intestines.

Here’s good news: Studies show you can’t consume too many probiotics. “When you are sick, you want to saturate the flora with good bacteria as soon as possible,” says Lalonde. “You can’t take too many. No bad side effects have ever been reported in the literature.”

Building stores of the right probiotics are essential to your overall health not just to prevent or correct an overgrowth of bad bacteria, but because they support absorption of nutrients within the intestines. “The largest aspect of our immune system is in our intestine, called the Gut Associated Lymphoid Tissue, or the GALT,” says Alex Kraft, a naturopathic physician, licensed acupuncturist and lead practitioner at a Pharmaca integrated drug store based in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood. “There’s little patches along the whole gastro-intestinal tract, trying to detect what is foreign or not. Our intestine is much more permeable than our skin. Our skin acts as a barrier but the intestines need to absorb things back and forth all the time, so the intestines have to have a good immune system. Some of the probiotics actually secrete things that help boost that immune system.”