How a Healthy Digestive System Can Help You Lose Weight
July 07, 2014
There is no doubt that a healthy diet and plenty of exercise will help you lose weight – both in terms of calories in vs calories out, and the nutritional value of your food. But did you know that the type and variety of bacteria in your gut plays a huge part in the effectiveness of any weight loss plan?
Scientists have discovered links between the diversity of the bacteria in the gut of athletes, compared to control groups of non-athletes of both low BMI (Body Mass Index) and high BMI. Generally speaking, a higher BMI equals more fat.
They found that the athletes had a highly diverse composition of microbiota (the strains of bacteria that makes up the digestive system), while the thinner group of non-athletes had less diversity and the fatter of the control groups had the least amount of diversity of gut bacteria – meaning that the more athletic and leaner the subjects were, the greater the variety of bacteria strains that were found in their gut.
The composition of the bacteria in your digestive system is important. Other studies have shown a link between low microbiota diversity and digestive diseases, disorders, and also obesity – in other words, people with less variety of gut bacterial had more problems. One particularly interesting study at UCSF took gut bacteria from two twins – one obese, one lean, and placed those bacteria in mice. They found that a mouse that had bacteria from the fat twin, started to lose weight when it was given bacteria from the lean twin – but the opposite was not true. This again tells us that healthy and diverse bacteria composition contributes to weight loss.
The link between higher bacterial diversity and exercise is a new one, and is still been examined. The actual mechanisms need more study, but the trend has definitely been established that healthy people with a strong immune system, lean body mass and a few digestive issues all have one thing in common: A diverse composition of gut bacteria.
The composition of our microbiota is something we should all be concerned with on a daily basis. A great way of doing this is by adding selected strains of beneficial bacteria each day to continually improve the microbiota composition. This needs to be done carefully – there is no use in loading up on unproven bacterial strains. Additionally, taking a multi strain probiotic does not necessarily improve the diversity of bacteria found in the microbiota – it has been found that single strains of probiotic bacteria stimulate the growth of other bacteria in the human microbiota. Multi strain products do not guarantee what the individual will be ingesting when they take the product therefore no one knows what the true impact will be.
This is where Natren’s years of scientific study and evaluation comes in. Specifically, the three types of beneficial bacterial in our flagship Healthy Trinity probiotic are included for their proven function in the digestive ecosystem. As always, we encourage everyone who wants to take their health seriously and take a daily probiotic supplement, to carefully research the contents and make sure they are taking a proven probiotic that is based on science and clinical results, and not on marketing and buzzwords. If you need any help, call one of our Probiotic Consultants at (866) 4-NATREN for further guidance – we’re happy to help you understand what you should be putting in your body to improve your gut health, and why. Also click here to learn how probiotics may help with weight loss.
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