A few paragraphs about beer. Kind of.
Yet another journal publishes an article saying take probiotics (friendly bacteria, the kind that a healthy person has living with them at all times) to prevent that oh, so unpleasant stool viscosity caused by killing off all your beneficial bacteria.
Those happy little bugs do a lot more than save on TP. They keep bad bugs from taking over, participate in digestion, and provide essential nutrients.
Annoyingly, this has been known for as long as antibiotics have been in use.
Still makes me happy to see it in print, though.
BMJ. Published online 6/29/07
I have taken a very effective approach to both preventing the two-step and maintaining bowel ecology.
Antibiotics, of course, do not kill yeast. Do kill friendly bacteria (normal flora) This is why following a course of antibiotic treatment can lead to a yeast (Candida) overgrowth. The good bacteria that keep the bad bacteria-- and yeast-- in check are wiped out. So Candida albicans, those joyous white curds, explode in population.
Now here is where the beer comes in.
Beer was once an important food stuff. Water couldn’t be trusted for purity. But beer could. As long as it didn’t have any off flavors you knew you weren’t going to get sick as you might getting a drink from the local lake.
The water for the beer is boiled. Kills any nasty bacteria.
Then, when the sugars from the malted grains have been extracted in the water, the temperature is dropped to the point where it won’t kill the yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) that converts the sugar to alcohol.
The big point here is the brewer gets that yeast into the beer as soon as possible and in high quantities because his beer is vulnerable to infection by wild yeast and bacteria until the desirable, protective yeast is established in the beer. Once the good yeast takes off, the bad guys have no chance of infecting the beer.
This is exactly like the situation in your gut. Mine. Everybody’s after antibiotic therapy.
So what I do is recommend taking a friendly yeast (Saccharomyces boulardii) while on therapy to prevent Candida overgrowth, and overgrowth of any resistant bacteria for that matter (Heard of Methicillin Resistant Staph. Aureus?) then towards the end of the drug therapy begin taking friendly bacteria to inoculate the gut and re-establish normal bowel ecology.
Update:
The crisis is ongoing.
In a JAMA article published 10/24/12, hospital acquired infections (nosocomial infections) and resultant deaths are discussed.
Time to put normal flora to work in our hospitals and nursing homes.
Update 2:
Probiotic versus bowel infection.
It was just this kind of research some years ago that turned me toward interest in gut health.
One month reports came out about 14 deaths in UK hospitals from Clostridium infection-- later found to have been introduced by nurses' dirty fingernails.
The next month several internists at a US hospital co-authored a paper on probiotics preventing Clostridium infection in a hospital setting.
The disconnect used to infuriate me.
Now I see it as sad/pathetic.
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