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Are you kidding? Of course they are! Not only are prebiotics good for you, they're an extremely important nutrient group that you must have from natural foods that contain lots of them, or from a good quality supplement, quality being the operative word but more on that later. Prebiotics are required to feed the probiotics (good bacteria) living in your digestive tract. You need all the probiotics you can get because having them outnumber the bad bacteria the co-exist with them in your gut is vital to keep away bad digestive symptoms and disease. The rough percentage is 80/20 in favor of the good bacteria, if this tilts the other way your immune system could fail you. Many people realize the importance of probiotics and that's why so many companies have been promoting them in food products like juice and yogurt. Unfortunately, scientists have discovered that adding probiotic supplements to increase the ones inside you already doesn't really do any good. What has been discovered, is that the all-important bacteria known as probiotics needs prebiotics to feed and support them allowing for growth and at the same time inhibiting production of more bad bacteria. So what exactly are prebiotics then? Prebiotic are found in certain foods that belong to the carbohydrate food group such as whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. They do not occur naturally inside our digestive system like probiotics do. We must ingest prebiotic foods and supplements to get them inside where they can do their job and feed the probiotic microbes. For a food to be deemed a prebiotic source, it must contain these important nutrients: enzymes phenols fiber An interesting and important fact about prebiotics is that they do not get digested. Certain prebiotic nutrients will get extracted by the small intestine as needed and the rest will move along to the large intestine to do more important work there. Insoluble fiber is a good example of this. This bulky fiber stimulates the intestines helping food move through them more easily and quickly. This type of prebiotic some experts believe, actually helps in preventing colon cancer because it picks up poisonous toxins in our digestive tract before they can find their way into our bloodstream and do damage. Neither pro- or prebiotics are anything new to us; ancient egyptians used fermentation so probiotics supplements were in their diet thousands of years ago. Prebiotics are in foods available to all of us in whole grains such as oats, wheat, and barley. Not the processed stuff like white rice and pasta. Also just about any fruit especially the kiwifruit and raw vegetables. You will undoubtedly start seeing more prebiotic supplements on the market. Use your common sense and try to find natural, quality products. For example you may see a chocolate spread advertising it has prebiotics in it, but chocolate is loaded with refined sugar which is counter-productive to what prebiotics are supposed to do. Read labels and know what the manufacturers are using to make these products or else you won't be getting the health benefits you may think you are. Any company that uses a high heat extraction process for example, in making a prebiotic supplement out of an actual real food, like the kiwifruit, which is an almost perfect prebiotic food by the way, if a high heat process is used you know that the food's enzymes will be destroyed with the heat. For more information on the benefits of prebiotics, how they work and which are the best quality supplement available visit our website http://www.natural-digestion.com
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