day 21 - 25 Days of wellness
Hi there! I’ve seen a couple of people I follow do Advent calendars for various things - 1000 Hours Outside has one for outdoor family activities, and Nutritious Movement has one for movement to create a “butt for the holidays” haha. So good.
So here we go - I’m going to drop a little post each day on a little Wellness tidbit for you to consider. Enjoy!
DAY 21 - probiotics
Have you heard of probiotics before?
In contrast to the micro-organisms commonly associated with disease (whether they originate the disease or simply are found where disease exists is a matter of great exciting debate!), probiotics are considered the “good guys” that keep everybody in balance. “Beneficial bacteria” they are sometimes called. A healthy microbiome must have a hearty amount of these guys. Our microbiomes are the ecosystem of all of the bacteria, yeasts, and viruses that exist throughout our whole bodies. Some even say they (the “good” and the “bad”) “run” our bodies by communicating with our nervous system or triggering cravings for certain foods (let’s talk Candida Albicans some time!).
Ensuring you have a good and diverse population of beneficial bacteria in your gut, on your skin, etc., is an important step towards greater immunity and general health. The most convenient way to do this is to grab a probiotic pill. Unfortunately some have concluded that the good guys in those pills don’t even make it alive to where we are trying to get them and have created an even heftier pill designed to deliver them all the way. That’s too complicated and expensive for me. Here’s what I do instead:
Eat fermented foods.
Fermented foods have orders of magnitude higher quantities and varieties of probiotics per tablespoon than any pill you can get on the market PLUS they come packaged with pre-biotics. Prebiotics are bacteria food — FIBER!
Here are some of my favorites: sauerkraut, kimchee, pickles of all kinds of vegetables, chilero, kefir water, kombucha…
The key is to look for these foods in the refrigerator section. The ones on the store have been pasturized (and often have dyes and preservatives added to them) so all they are is fiber with a little bit of chemicals. When you get the live brands (Bubbies is a great one), you get the true probiotics with their prebiotics and none of the extra unnecessary chemicals. What are your favorite fermented foods?
See you on Day 22!
