‘Friendly’ bacteria for gut health
Science is still uncovering the many ways our bodies benefit or suffer from the various strains of bacteria living in our digestive tracts. Did you know that your body houses many more bacteria than you even have cells? There are good ones and sometimes bad ones, and of course you want to be sure your gut is populated with good ones, so these probiotics from Vitacost will go a long way to help make sure that remains the case.
If you already consume a fairly wide variety of probiotic-containing foods like unpasteurized yogurt, kefir, buttermilk, sauerkraut, kimchi, and so forth, and you have no gut problems, you probably do not need to routinely supplement with probiotics. And if you do supplement with probiotics, it won’t hurt to skip a day or two occasionally because your gut population will remain just fine. You could even take a single capsule daily, half the recommended dose of two capsules, and still keep your gut population of these friendly bacteria high.
However, when you are ill and taking antibiotics, those drugs have the potential to kill most or all of your gut bacteria, and in that case supplementing with probiotics becomes very important. Some of the smarter medical doctors now even prescribe probiotics to their patients who are on antibiotics! I routinely consume probiotic-containing foods and I have no gut problems, so I do not normally supplement my diet with probiotics, but I do keep a bottle of these high-quality Vitacost probiotics in my refrigerator for those rare occasions when I do need to take antibiotics, and as a minimum that is what I would suggest for you too.