Probiotics are a combination of live beneficial bacteria and/or yeasts that naturally live in your body, but can they restore gut health?
You have two kinds of bacteria constantly in and on your body, good bacteria and bad bacteria. Probiotics are made up of good bacteria that helps keep your body healthy and working well. This good bacteria helps you in many ways, including fighting off bad bacteria when you have too much of it, helping you feel better. Probiotics are part of a larger picture concerning bacteria and your body, your microbiome. Think of a microbiome as a diverse community of organisms, such as a forest, that work together to keep your body healthy [1].
There is currently a large amount of research happening around the idea of what probiotics can do for gut heath. Even though there are a lot of possible positive outcomes, researchers are still working to find definitive answers about how probiotics can restore gut health. Some of the research has shown that probiotics may restore the composition of the gut microbiome and introduce beneficial functions to gut microbial communities, resulting in amelioration or prevention of gut inflammation and other intestinal or systemic disease phenotypes [2].
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/14598-probiotics
