FBC Treasurer Sebastian Nummelin blogs how probiotics can help you

Greetings and I hope you are all managing to stay optimistic and positive despite the current challenging situation!

Maintaining a positive outlook is important for supporting not only your mental health but your physical health as well. Stress and anxiety have been shown to have a negative effect on overall health and wellbeing – especially for our immune systems. And at times like this, we really want our immunity to be top-notch!   

Our biggest immune organ is actually our digestive system – did you know that more than 70% of your immune system lives around your digestive system? This means good immune health also comes from good digestive health. Everything we eat and drink is filtered by our digestive system and we absorb all the good nutrients from our food, though sometimes we also get exposed to harmful bacteria called pathogens.

Luckily the good bacteria we have in our gut protects us against the bad ones. An adult has about 2-3 kilos of bacteria in our digestive system. You can feel confident next time when you stand on the scale in the morning, those few kilos are only bacteria!   

Unfortunately, we cannot educate our digestive system not to take up excessive fat and stay slim, but we can educate our digestive system to give us healthy immunity! So how can we improve our immune health is what people often ask? Maybe now more than ever before? We have to take care of our digestive health! In particular, we need to ensure we have good levels of good bacteria or probiotics in our gut. The right bacteria in our body makes a difference.   

Daily fruit gives us prebiotics which helps to feed the good bacteria, and fermented products such as yoghurt or kimchi contain a lot of good bacteria called probiotics.  The concept of probiotics has become a very hot topic in the last few years, you can find them everywhere! Even in chocolate! It’s a sea full of choices when shopping for probiotics. However, only clinically proven and tested and probiotic products will help improve your general health any immunity. Sadly the majority of all probiotics on the market have no clinically backed claims.  

With this said, I wish you all stay healthy during difficult times and remember to take care of your mental health, digestive health, and immune health with good nourishment and self-care!

Sebastian Nummelin, BioGaia