Do you take a probiotic or eat Greek yogurt? If so, do me a favor.
Flip the container around and read the back.
You’ll notice some pretty strange sounding ingredients on the label. And unless you took Latin in high school, they might all look like Greek to you.
Probiotics have all been given strange Latin names. Which can make dealing with them a little confusing sometimes.
But there are two things to keep in mind…
- ALL the strains can be beneficial.
- They don’t all have the EXACT same benefits.
One strain I’ve mentioned before, Lactobacillius casei, or L. casei for short, is in the news again.
I’ve written to you about L. casei pairing up with L. acidophilus and B. bifidum to fight depression and anxiety.
And in another study, this strain slashed the inflammation and pain associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
But now scientists say this common probiotic could help folks struggling with their blood sugar.
Here’s how they figured it out…
Probiotic L. casei sends blood sugar plummeting
A team of researchers at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences recruited 40 volunteers with type 2 diabetes.
They did blood work on all the participants. And then they divided them up into two groups.
Group one took a daily probiotic capsule containing 108 colony forming units (CFU) of L. casei. And group two got a look-alike sugar pill.
The two groups continued to take the capsules for eight weeks. And then the researchers took a fresh set of blood samples.
All of the samples were carefully examined by a diabetes specialist known as an endocrinologist. And remarkably within just two months, the probiotic had made a BIG impact.
In fact, it had started to REVERSE the volunteer’s diabetes symptoms.
There were significant reductions in…
- fasting blood sugar
- insulin concentration
- insulin resistance
There were EVEN some signs of their HbA1c, an important measure of blood sugar over time, starting to go down.
And those benefits alone should be enough to make anyone concerned about their blood sugar to consider giving L. casei a try.
But they weren’t the only ones.
The probiotic also helped with something else many folks with type 2 diabetes struggle with… weight control.
The volunteers taking the L. casei capsules lost weight, improved their BMI, and reduced their waist size.
Lose weight and improve metabolism with L. casei
How the probiotics managed to trigger such significant changes in just eight short weeks can be a bit complicated.
But in a nutshell here’s how the researchers believe the process works.
The probiotic supplements change the balance of your gut bugs.
This shift affects your appetite, so you end up eating less. And naturally, you shed some weight as a result.
At the same time, through a fermentation process, the probiotics bump up your body’s production of short chain fatty acids. And this increase in SCFAs has a positive effect on your metabolism.
- casei is a common probiotic. You’ll find it in a many yogurts. Look for a plain Greek variety, and add your own fruit if you like, for the best results.
And probiotic products containing the L. casei strain can be found anywhere supplements are sold.
She is an advocate of self-education and is passionate about the power of group knowledge sharing, like the kind found right here on HealthierTalk.com. Alice loves to share her views on holistic and natural healing as well as her, sometimes contentious, thoughts on the profit-driven inner workings of traditional medicine.
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