An Amazing study just out – probiotics improve emotional and mental function by increasing connections between parts of the brain! study showed
probiotic benefits:
· Reduces risks for colon cancer
· reduces irritable bowel and colitis symptoms, less bloating, gas, cramping, diarrhea and constipation
· reduces anxiety and modulate brain activity.
· Relieves eczema and other allergies in children (especially if taken during pregnancy) (study was done on prebiotics but probiotics should be even more effective in this regard)
· cure intestinal infections
· lowers cholesterol
· lowers blood sugar
· enhances weight loss
· improves liver function
Recommendation How to take Qbiotic:
· best taken daily with or without foods (thanks to delivery mechanism)
· may be taken more than once daily
· Only side effects may be temporary change in stools, increased gas as bacteria fight it out - should normalize in 2-4 days
· especially important to take more Qbiotics
when taking antibiotics, when ill, after eating sugar
In a proof-of-concept study using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers found that women who regularly consumed probiotic-containing yogurt showed altered activity of brain regions that control central processing of emotion and sensation. The study was funded by Danone Research.
"This study is unique because it is the first to show an interaction between a probiotic and the brain in humans," lead author Kirsten Tillisch, MD, associate professor, Oppenheimer Family Center for Neurobiology of Stress, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, told Medscape Medical News.
The results appear in the June 2013 issue of Gastroenterology.
Modulating Brain Function
"This is a very important study as up to now most of the evidence that the gut microbiota can influence brain and behavior have emerged from studies in mouse models including our own work (Bravo et al., PNAS 2011)," John Cryan, PhD, professor and head of the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience, University College Cork, Ireland, who was not involved in the study, told Medscape Medical News.
"Tillisch and colleagues now have neatly shown that probiotics can also affect resting brain activity in human subjects using neuroimaging techniques. This gives credence to the idea that we may eventually modulate brain function in disease states using probiotics. That said, it is a small study, only in women, and the mechanism as to how the bacteria are inducing their effects remains unclear," Dr. Cryan said.
Dr. Kirsten Tillisch
The study involved 36 healthy women with no gastrointestinal or psychiatric symptoms. Twice daily for 4 weeks, 12 women ate a fermented yogurt product containing the probiotics Bifidobacterium animalis subsp Lactis, Streptococcus thermophiles, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, and Lactococcus lactis subsp Lactis; 11 women ate a nonfermented milk product (controls), and 13 received no intervention.
The women underwent fMRI before and after the intervention to measure resting brain activity and brain responses to an emotion-recognition task in which they viewed a series of pictures of people with angry or scared faces and matched them to other faces showing the same emotions. The researchers say they chose this task because studies in animals have linked changes in gut flora to changes in affective behaviors.
During the emotional reactivity task, the probiotic group showed significantly reduced activity (P = .004) in a widely distributed functional network containing affective, viscerosensory, and somatosensory cortices.
During resting fMRI, the probiotic group showed greater connectivity between the periaqueductal grey matter of the midbrain and cognition-associated areas of the prefrontal cortex.
These changes were not observed in the group that consumed the nonfermented milk product; "thus the findings appear to be related to the ingested bacteria strains and their effects on the host," the authors say.
Prebiotics May
