Hey guys, remember we said this was going to be a series, well here is part 2.
So here’s my take home from the studies in the article,
- Taking probiotics for 30 days in the morning at a dosage of 3 billion a day alleviated psychological distress in volunteers and demonstrated beneficial psychological effects in healthy human volunteers (In this case they used 2 types of bacteria L.helveticus and B.longum.
- One of the markers they used to assess improvement is a functional medicine test that measures the urinary free cortisol (UFC) over 24 hours and assesses your ‘stress levels’ and what they found was that they went down over time in the probiotics consuming group whereas the stress levels were stable in the control group.
- probiotics worked better than placebo and similar to diazepam (used as a reference).
- elderly patients that took L.helveticus had better sleep.
- a few strains of Lactobacillus reduced inflammation in the gut.
- L.casei shirota strain reduced anxiety in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)
- humans with Ulcerative Colitis (UC) benefited when they took B.Longum
As it turns out, besides competing with the bad guys in your gut, and on top of reducing inflammation causing cytokines in your gut wall cells, it appears the bacteria living in our guts have a connection with the central nervous system, using the sensory fibres of the vagus nerve to transmit information to the brain which affects serotonin and dopamine levels thus making us less anxious and depressed.
“wow!” he said, sipping some ice cold, mint infused kombucha 😉
See you in part 3 – To be continued…
“Conclusion:
Consumption of the PF containing L. helveticus R0052 and B. longum R0175 in combination mitigated psychological distress in three tests without displaying any adverse event. These results provide further evidence that gut microflora play a role in stress, anxiety and depression, perhaps via the enteric nervous system as well as centrally. Subject to the confirmation of these results, probiotics might offer a useful novel therapeutic approach to neuro- pathological disorders and/or as adjunct therapies in psychiatric disorders(75)”
References
Michael Messaoudi et al. (2011). Assessment of psychotropic-like properties of a probiotic formulation (Lactobacillus helveticus R0052 and Bifidobacterium longum R0175) in rats and human subjects, British Journal of Nutrition (105), 755-764.
