“We’ve been told yogurt is good for us.  And in times past, most cultures have traditions of fermented food, such as sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, and a tasty tea-based drink I’ve been fermenting at home, called kombucha.  All these foods are jam-packed with living yeast and bacteria species that go down your gullet to comingle with the one hundred trillion (yes, trillion) bacteria already living there.

90% of the cells in your body are the bacteria who live on and within you. Most of them live in your colon.  The species of bacteria in your colon could determine how thin or fat you are, or maybe how vulnerable you are to stress.  The commensal beasties are difficult to study as they don’t live outside the human gut and can’t be cultured in a lab.  There’s a lot to learn.

So fermented food had an obvious advantage in that it kept longer in the days before refrigerators, but did it have another advantage perpetuating it’s existence in so many cultures in human history?  Are the probiotics helpful in keeping the beasties in our gut happy and healthy?  I’ve discussed this issue a bit in a previous post, but last year a new paper came out that is also interesting:

Probiotics function mechanistically as delivery vehicles for neuroactive compounds: Microbial endocrinology in the design and use of probiotics.” Get more here: Groovy Probiotics | Psychology Today.

Good stuff! Lately, my wife has been introducing us to probiotics and it’s definitely worth looking into…