Navigating Celiac Disease with the Help of Beneficial Bacteria Ep. 153

This episode promises to be a treasure trove of information, revealing how probiotics can not only assist in weight management and boost your immune system but also potentially alleviate mental health struggles. From personal experiences to the latest studies, you'll gain a wealth of knowledge on how probiotics could be a game-changer in your diet and why strains like lactobacilli might be your new best friends in supporting celiac disease.

I'll share the practical ways you can weave probiotics into your everyday life, making a profound difference in your digestive health. Whether you're curious about sauerkraut's superpowers or considering a daily dose of a multi-strain supplement, this discussion is designed to guide you toward a happier, healthier gut microbiome.

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Music Credit bensound.com 

Chapters

• 0:00 Improving Gut Health With Probiotics
• 8:34 The Power of Probiotics
• 12:37 Benefits of Adding Probiotics to Diet

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:24

Did you know that the bacteria in your body actually outnumbers the amount of cells that you have? We have trillions of bacteria. Now, this bacteria can be good and it can also be bad. So I want to talk to you today about how we can improve the good bacteria, particularly in our gut, and the benefits of doing so. Now, when we talk about bacteria, there are a number of different types of bacteria and they all play a different role in our health and our lives. So the bacteria that live in your gut many of those are beneficial to your health, but some of those cause disease. So I want to talk to you today about probiotics and the role that probiotics can play in your health and the improvement of your digestion, and how that plays in with living with celiac disease. So in the past, I've talked about, you know, recommending probiotics to anyone with celiac disease. So this is something that I cover off for my clients and my students, and I know that I've talked about it on previous episodes, but I haven't ever really sort of delved into why the reason that we need probiotics. Okay, so I wanted to cover that off for you today.

Speaker 1: 1:41

So probiotics are basically live microorganisms and they provide a number of health benefits. So so when you think about you know where you've heard about probiotics. You can get them from a number of ways. So you can get them from your diet or you can take a supplement. So there's different foods that you can get probiotics from. So things like pickles, kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt is a very common one that we hear that has got the good bacteria in there or the good probiotics. So you can eat these types of foods or you can take a supplement. So you can buy probiotics in lots of different places. Supermarkets sell them, health food stores, chemists, pharmacies, places like that. You can get different probiotics. So you can buy them in a tablet form, you can buy them in a powder form. Some of them have to be refrigerated, some of them don't have to be refrigerated. So it totally depends on you and your lifestyle. But by the end of this episode I think you'll want to go out and start adding probiotics into your diet. So let's talk about some of the ways that they help your health and then we'll talk about how this relates to us living with celiac disease.

Speaker 1: 3:01

So probiotics have been shown to support weight loss, which is fantastic if you are trying to lose weight. There was a study done on a group of people that took probiotics and they were able to reduce their belly fat dramatically by taking probiotics. So something to think about. If that is a goal for you, that you want to lose weight and you need some support in that area, you could simply add in a probiotic and see if that makes a difference to your weight loss goals.

Speaker 1: 3:31

Another one is it supports healthy digestion. In fact, it's crucial for healthy digestion. So another thing is you'll find that you will improve your immune function. So if you find that you know winter hits and you get sick quite often, you know if you don't get through a winter without getting sick, I'd definitely say you'd need to be adding in a probiotic to support your immune function. For sure that's like. Without a doubt, that'd be something that's definitely worth adding in. It can help improve your skin. It's been shown to lower depression and anxiety, which is huge because, as we know, the brain and the gut talk to each other and when you've got your gut out of whack, that can completely change the way that your brain functions. So if you can look at that and go, wow, I do get a bit of anxiety or I do suffer from depression. Again, adding in probiotics is a game changer.

Speaker 1: 4:32

Now this one's a little bit more controversial. There's not a lot of data around this, but they do say that it may help with blood cholesterol and they've also shown that it can reduce blood pressure as well by adding in probiotics. Now, when we talk about these different sort of complementary supports, so think of probiotics as a complementary supplement or addition to your diet. Let's put it that way. There's not a lot of studies, okay, and I've talked about this in previous episodes and the reason why. So pharmaceutical companies will put money towards studies to prove that their pharmaceutical product helps benefit certain things, but when it's a complementary product, they don't make as much money out of it, so there's not as much study done on these types of products. So obviously, you can get this from your diet. You don't have to take a pharmaceutical grade product, so these companies don't want to put money towards that. However, saying that, there are some studies that are very, very promising. So one study in particular was done on a group of children with celiac disease and they gave one half of the group a placebo and they gave the other half a probiotic and throughout this period of this study, they noticed that the children that were taking the probiotic had less diarrhea, so during that period of time, their diarrhea decreased dramatically enough for the doctors that had done the study to say, yes, it is beneficial for people with celiac disease to be taking a probiotic to reduce the symptoms that they may suffer from, so I think that's very promising. I think that's a really great study.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Now there's two strains of bacteria that are the most common and are beneficial to adding into our diet, and they are bifactobacterium and lactobacilli. So these two are the main ones that we want to focus on, and if you were to go out and look for a supplement form of a probiotic, I would recommend that you purchase one that's got multiple strains. Don't get one that's just got one strain, because different strains have different purposes and do different things to our body and look after different bacteria in your gut. So look for one that's got a multitude of, or a couple of, different strains, rather. Now this is another thing to look at.

Speaker 1: 7:16

So if you are eating processed gluten-free food, which most people do, it's quite common to live with celiac disease and eat processed gluten-free food, which most people do. It's quite common to live with celiac disease and eat processed gluten-free food. When you are doing that, you are feeding the bad bacteria in your gut, so it goes without saying that you then need to go and support the good bacteria in your gut. Okay, so the problem is these products that are processed are not enriched with fiber. I've talked about this in previous episodes where I've talked about processed food, and what that happens is the good bacteria is not getting fed what it needs to be fed by this food. All right, so this is where it's important to focus on adding in root vegetables, because those root vegetables will then help support different bacteria that's in your gut and help feed those so that they grow and reproduce, and that's where we get all these beautiful benefits of having probiotics. So we want to feed the good bacteria, we want to improve the amount of good bacteria in our gut, and we get all these beautiful other flow-on effects from doing so, which is amazing.

Speaker 1: 8:34

Now one other study that was done showed that lactobacilli actually detoxified gliadin fragments after partial ingestion, and what they kind of took from this study was probiotics can be quite helpful for people that aren't adhering to a 100% gluten-free diet and I'm not saying this to you know, go and have some gluten and take a probiotic and it'll be fine. Absolutely not at all. More so that if you are, say, living in a country where you're allowed to have 20 parts per million of gluten in your food, you are still getting tiny fragments of gluten in your diet. They say they're not harmful, but they may be adding up to harmful effects. So if you take a probiotic or you consume foods that have got probiotics in them alongside your diet, this could potentially help you to feel better and to be breaking down those particles, which is huge in itself.

Speaker 1: 9:38

I've been taking probiotics for a very long time. I've been taking them since I was pregnant with my first daughter, so over 16 years now. I take a sachet of a probiotic, so mine is one that comes in like a little stick sachet, and the reason I like that one is it doesn't have to be refrigerated. I can take it when I'm traveling you know we're going camping this weekend and I can pack them in my bag and don't have to worry about them. They're, you know, single dose. Now, one of the most simple ways of increasing the good bacteria in your gut is to actually consume sauerkraut or fermented vegetables, so one tablespoon of fermented vegetables per day is enough to increase the good bacteria in your gut by 10,000. 10,000. That is insane. That's a really, really cheap way of improving the good bacteria in your gut.

Speaker 1: 10:35

So if you don't have the finances to be going out and buying probiotics and adding those into your diet as far as a supplemental form, think about adding in probiotics fermented vegetables, because you can get those from the supermarket. You can get them from the health food store. Just make sure you're buying ones that aren't done in vinegar. Make sure you get proper fermented vegetables that are done through the fermentation way that is traditionally done by using salt. So make sure that you're not getting the ones that are done in vinegar, because that is not as effective. So the ones that you want to be looking for are correctly done fermented vegetables in salt. So yeah, like I said, you can get them quite inexpensive from the supermarket. A lot of health food stores sell them as well.

Speaker 1: 11:23

So that would be a really great way of adding in probiotics very easily into your diet. I know that might sound challenging to do that once a day by adding that tablespoon. If you can tolerate it, you could just eat it and pretend that's your supplement for the day, or go for something like I said what do I take? A sachet or a peel, something like that. If you can't sort of see yourself adding in, you know, sauerkraut or yogurt or one of these other types of foods that you could add to your diet, is a great way of doing it. So I hope that has inspired you to look at probiotics.

Speaker 1: 12:01

Maybe add them into your life, because they are powerful. They are incredible. There've been many studies done that show that the human gut is decreasing the amount of good bacteria inside it and it's very important for our human function that we continue to keep this good bacteria in our bodies. So look at how you can do this for yourself. Add in whichever supplement or food is going to work for you and your lifestyle and just see how much of a difference it makes in your life, because they are very, very powerful and can certainly make a difference to the way that you feel.

Speaker 1: 12:37

There are usually no known side effects of having probiotics or consuming probiotics, which is fabulous, so it's not something you need to be concerned about. Think of it as complimentary support to living with celiac disease and see how you feel. So, yeah, go ahead and add in which one you think is going to be the most beneficial or easiest for you to add into your lifestyle and see how you feel and what sort of a difference it makes to your life. So thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. I hope you learned a thing or two and are now inspired to start adding probiotics into your diet. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you again next.