The microbiome that inhabits our gut has a hundred trillion cells and up to 250 different species. There are many studies out there that showed that obese people tend to have gut flora changes compared to lean people. In fact, scientists did studies where they took the flora from a fat person and transplanted it into a tiny little mouse. After a period of time, that mouse wasn’t so tiny anymore. It became fat. Studies have also shown that obese people often have lower species diversity in their gut.

A recent case-control study showed that antibiotic use led to a 53% increase in diabetes, reported in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2015. It’s obvious that antibiotics severely alter our gut flora, and we can even wipe out species that should be there. Another study of over a million people reported in The European Journal of Endocrinology in 2015, showed a similar 37% increase in diabetes and weight gain with increased antibiotic exposure. The conclusion of both studies was that antibiotics kill the good flora and favor weight gain and diabetes.

What is the relation between digestive enzymes and weight loss? How can probiotics prevent the damage caused by antibiotics, aging, and other factors on healthy gut bacteria?

There’s some really interesting cool science supporting the theory that healthy gut bacteria can help you to lose weight. A probiotic is a product that you take and replenishes healthy gut bacteria.

By the time you are in your forties or fifties, you have developed all of your good bacteria. We are talking about trillions of trillions of colonies of bacteria that are good for you. It comes from your environment, and it comes from your mother’s milk. Thet’s why breastfeeding is crucial for babies. Babies that don’t breastfeed have less good gut bacteria and they tend to have more autoimmune issues and allergies when they are older. So, all of the good gut bacteria that you have is established by age too, and while you are aging, you need to replenish it from external sources.

As a matter of fact, a probiotic product is a foundational supplement. Think about the supplement pyramid. At the base of your supplement regimen are the foundational supplements such as multivitamins, omega-3 fats, CO Q10, and probiotics. They’re all so important in all phases of digestion!

Now we are going to talk about a study that shows with some interest in science that probiotics might actually help you to lose some weight. This study was published in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2013. Researchers recruited 125 obese people who were split into two groups. The first group received pills containing Lactobacillus species, an excellent probiotic that you’ll find in most probiotics supplements. The second group was given a placebo. All subjects from both groups were on the same weight loss program for twelve weeks followed by another twelve weeks maintenance program. Scientists noticed that women that were given the probiotic lost about ten pounds. The women in the placebo group lost an average of four pounds. The interesting fact is that men didn’t lose their weight whether they were taking a probiotic or not. The probiotic in this case didn’t seem to help men, at least based on this one study.

So, according to this study, women taking probiotics were experiencing greater weight loss than women not taking probiotics by basically following the same weight loss program. Interestingly, after the twelve weeks maintenance period following the weight loss plan, the women getting the probiotics continued to lose fat and weight while women from the second research group gained the fat back. So there seems to be even a protective effect. Not only did the women taking the probiotics lose more weight, but they continued to lose some weight during the maintenance period, versus women taking the placebo who gained the weight back.

There’s some really cool science going on. We know that inflammation and hunger hormones play a role in obesity, so some hormones influence your desire to eat or not to eat. Another study was done in Quebec. Scientists noticed that the levels of leptin in women getting probiotics was considerably higher. Leptin is the hunger hormone that controls the appetite. Leptin is released from your fat cells, travels to your brain, and tells your brain to stop eating – meaning you had enough food at that meal. During the study, women taking the probiotics had an increased leptin production, more of that leptin was actually getting to the brain, and they were eating less food. The women who did not take the probiotics were still making leptin. As a matter of fact, they started to make even more leptin compared to the women in the first group, but the leptin wasn’t getting to the brain. So there seems to be some sort of controlling mechanism that healthy gut bacteria have over the hunger hormone leptin, in specifically getting leptin into the brain, where it belongs.

We do believe probiotics are starting to step into their own as true supplements for prevention and treatment of other diseases such as inflammatory bowel disorders, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, strengthening the immune system, and maybe even helping people to lose weight. More research will be done with regards to that connection between probiotics and leptin, and we think it’s pretty interesting!

You can eat probiotics; you can eat fermented foods. Fermented foods have some probiotics. The problem is most of the fermented foods that you buy in your neighborhood convenience store or a grocery store they’re not the best-fermented foods. We know there’s a lot of marketing that goes behind certain yogurts for instance. We think they’re OK products, but they do not deliver the number of healthy gut bacteria that a good probiotic capsule will. So, if you want to benefit from probiotics, and fully replenish the gut bacteria, supplement your alimentation with good probiotic capsules.

So, probiotics are essential supplements. They help to support all phases of digestion and now there’s evidence that the probiotics are able to influence information in hunger hormones and help with weight loss in women.