How can probiotics help improve my brain health?
Probiotics are key for digestion and gut health, but they can also help improve the health of our brains. Neurologist David Perlmutter, MD, explains why having good gut bacteria is so important, and which foods have the most impact.
Transcript
There's a very big push, these days, to try to identify what is the very best nutritional supplement as it relates to a probiotic?
And I'd say, let's take a step back and look at what we've consumed over years, decades, hundreds of years in terms of giving
our bodies good bacteria. [MUSIC PLAYING]
What an exciting time we live in now when we understand that the gut bacteria that outnumber our cells 10 to 1 have a powerful role
to play in brain health. Gut bacteria involve the set point of inflammation, with inflammation being the cornerstone of just about
everything you don't want to get, including things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis and even depression, ADHD, and autism.
This is all dictated to a large degree by the bacteria that live within the intestine.
Who knew? It really gives us a very powerful leverage point in looking, for example, at the value of probiotics,
not just from a digestive perspective, but as they relate to the brain. So there's a very big push, these days,
to try to identify what is the very best nutritional supplement as it relates to a probiotic?
And I'd say, let's take a step back and look at what we've consumed over years, decades, hundreds of years in terms of giving
our bodies good bacteria. And these include the fermented foods which are still very popular today, things like kimchi
and sauerkraut and yogurt. Foods that are fermented-- drinking kombucha, for example, a fermented beverage.
These foods and beverages contain good bacteria. Kimchi contains something called lactobacillus
plantarum, a very important probiotic bacteria that tends to heal the leaky gut.
And make no mistake about it, a leaky gut translates to increased inflammation in your body. And again, that's a cornerstone of just about everything bad
that can happen to your brain. [AUDIO LOGO]
brain health nervous system
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