If you’re not taking a daily probiotic, you need to put this on the top of your to-do list. Probiotics boost the healthy communities of microbes living in your gut and these good guys help protect you from disease and boost your immunity.
If you have taken antibiotics in the last year, your gut microbiota is depleted by 50%, It will take about 1 year to build up your gut microbiota (see quick easy to read article here or full research study here).
SCDers can take these strains: Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Saccharomycees Boulardii is also recommended when needed. ANYTIME you take an antibiotic, you should take Saccharomyces Boulardii along with it. Luckily the antibiotic cannot kill it, so you can take near each other. Antibiotics DO kill the good probiotics, so space those out at least 2 hours apart.
Recommended SCD Probiotics:
Saccharomyces Boulardii Saccharomyces Boulardii is a unique non–pathogenic yeast which exercises beneficial actions in the intestinal tract. GI ProHealth carries a SCD legal brand of Saccharomyces Boulardii.
Also – EAT FERMENTED FOODS!!!! Sauerkraut, Kombucha, Kimchi
It is important to get as many varieties of good bacteria in your daily diet. Unfortunately as SCDers, strains are limited and that is exactly why you must add fermented foods to increase bacterial diversity.
I promise to add more pages about boosting your gut bacteria diversity in other ways. Some we can control and others we can not. It goes way back to how we were born (vaginally or C-section), were we breastfed?, did we or our child take multiple courses of antibiotics early in life? Were we raised in a city or on a farm? Did we grow up with a family dog? The list goes on and on with some very formative ways our microbiome has been shaped. We still have control though. Go dig in the dirt! REALLY! Alex is always assigned digging in the dirt chores! Ha! Plant a garden. Let the family dog kiss you. Don’t use hand sanitizers or soaps containing triclosan. Eat veggies from farmers markets, eat local. Eat real, whole foods!
For non-SCDers:
Take a wide variety of probiotics and eat fermented foods!
Here are a couple of my favorites:
Klaire Labs Chewable Kids – 25+
Garden of Life RAW Probiotics
TAKE PROBIOTICS EVERYDAY! ALL YEAR LONG!