5 Reasons Women Need Probiotics Everyday
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Probiotics help your body in numerous ways, and we can all benefit from taking them daily. While good for everyone, women actually get a little more help from probiotics than anyone else and should invest in adding them to their daily routine.
Starting a probiotic-rich diet, either with food or supplements, can help ensure that your bacterial communities are at an optimal level of performance. This gives busy women one less thing to worry about, keeping them healthy and ready to take on anything life throws their way.
The current American diet and busy lifestyle forces many women to rely on fast, processed foods during the day. Convenience is a big deal when you work full time, have kids, responsibilities, and a house to run.
These processed foods clog your arteries and gut, leaving a nice buffet of sugars for any visiting bad bacteria to thrive upon.
The older you get, the slower your digestive system gets, causing bacteria to become unbalanced. This increases your risk of disease and illness, as pathogenic strains get the opportunity to take over control in your body.
Probiotics are able to make nutrients available from the food you eat and can boost your digestion and immunity. They help to increase vitamin and mineral absorption allowing you to get the most from every meal.
You may know that you house trillions of bacteria, but aging and poor lifestyle choices cause these stores to become depleted over the years. Once the balance favors unhelpful strains, your digestive system starts to slow, making it easier for pathogens to take over by feasting on the poorly digested foods in your gut.
Probiotics are the best way to keep the balance right and keep your body performing at optimal levels.
The 5 Reasons to Take Probiotics
As stated, women benefit more from daily probiotics than anyone else. Specifically, there are five important reasons why women need to ensure they add a probiotic supplement to their daily routine.
Probiotics will help to ensure your optimal health, so you can focus on life and feel confident and healthy every day.
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Vaginal health: One aspect of health that women need to be concerned with is vaginal health. The bacteria in a woman’s gut have more to take care of then those living within men.
Female flora has to protect the digestive tract as well as the vaginal area. Both are easily invaded and taken over by pathogenic bacteria and yeasts and can lead to serious health complications if not addressed.
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Women are already at a disadvantage: Being busy each day with hectic schedules causes you to rely on convenient foods which are not healthy options. In fact, they are dangerous to your health and can cause damage to your system.
Fast food clogs your digestive system leaving undigested foods for bad bacteria to thrive on. If this continues to happen without correction, you will find yourself with increased risk of serious diseases.
Inflammatory-related diseases, such as arthritis and inflammatory bowel syndrome, are linked to poor digestive systems.
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Aging slows you down: You may have started off with a good store of friendly microbes, but as you age, these numbers dwindle and cause your immune and digestive systems to slow too. Just because you get older doesn’t mean you have less to take care of, so you need to stay at the top of your game.
Daily probiotics can help to keep your metabolism flowing smoothly and keep your immune system at peak performance.
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Not getting enough vitamins: The typical diet in America today lacks many of the essential vitamins and nutrients your body needs to thrive. Yes, you bought those multivitamins, but you forget to take them each morning.
You may forget to take a probiotic too, but there are food sources, such as yogurt, miso, and sauerkraut, that can deliver all the probiotics you need. Probiotics help to create certain B vitamins that you need. Adding these foods allows you to support healthy digestion and increase nutrient intake in order to maintain great overall health.
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Over-reliance on antibiotics: Doctors prescribe antibiotics for almost every ailment, and even though they accurately target bad bacteria, they also kill off your friendly ones, too.
This is not to say you should avoid antibiotics because often they are necessary. What is recommended is that if you need to follow a course of antibiotics, you should also take additional probiotics to keep the balance optimal within your gut.
What You Should Know Before Taking Probiotics
You now know why you need to take probiotics or follow a probiotic diet, but there are a few things you need to know about adding them to your diet.
Firstly, it is impossible to take too many. Probiotics do not take up permanent residence in your gut.
They will provide assistance in moving a pathogenic intruder through your tract quicker, but they eventually make their way out as well. This means you need to be consuming them daily to ensure you get enough in your system and the benefits they provide.
It is also important to understand that there are different strains that can help specific health problems. You want to be sure that you buy a probiotic that contains strains that will specifically help improve your health.
You also want to get a probiotic that contains at least 1 billion CFUs (colony-forming units) and always opt for foods that contain “live cultures or “live active cultures.”
Also keep in mind that probiotics have a shelf life. They are living organisms and will not last forever, especially if stored in a hot place. When buying a supplement, be sure to grab one with the furthest-out expiration date.
Stomach acid is strong for a reason: to break down all the food you eat. Unfortunately this also means that supplements can be destroyed before getting where they need to be.
Be sure to buy probiotic capsules that have a coated shell, so the bacteria can reach your intestines intact. Alternatively, you can choose to get probiotics through natural food sources, like yogurt and kefir.
Understanding the best probiotics to get and how to store and take them is necessary to ensure you get access to their full range of benefits.
