The word bacteria can often have negative connotations, but did you know that your body needs certain types of bacteria to function properly?
Well, every one of us have good bacteria and bad bacteria living in our digestive tracts (100 trillion bacteria's, to be precise!!!). Some are illness-causing bad bacteria, while others assist us in breaking down the food (digestion) and absorb the nutrients. Probiotics are made of good live bacteria and when consumed, increases the amount of good bacteria in the gut, thus improving your digestive health and help you get a robust immune system by helping your body fight the bad bacteria that may be present in the gut.
So, whenever you supplement a probiotic, you escalate the number of healthy bacteria in your intestines, helping your gut sustain good health. Supplementing probiotics do much more than keeping your gut healthy and improving your digestive system. Especially for the athletes involved in rigorous workouts & training schedules, supplementing probiotics can be vital to perform at their very best. We are sure you must be wondering how these bacteria can help an athlete with being healthy & also enhance their performance? Let us explain, read along…
Benefits of Supplementing Probiotics for Athletes
Probiotics are one of the most widely debated & researched topics around the world. Probiotics can be helpful in a lot of ways but let us review some of the significant benefits of supplementing probiotics & how it can be a game-changer for an athlete: -
Improves Immune System
Probiotics contain "lactobacillus bacteria," one of the bacteria that defend your body against other harmful bacteria. By supplementing probiotics, you are essentially sending reinforcements to your immune system. Probiotics and the immune system's function go hand in hand. So supplementing probiotics every day will help you work from the inside to protect your body, leading to a more robust immune system that will better defend itself against anything and everything.
Faster Recovery
A study published in Nutraceutical World looked at the possibility that probiotics aid in exercise recovery-
Sixteen athletes took daily probiotics supplements for three weeks & the other group, being the placebo, took no additional supplementation. Both groups did elbow flexion exercises at an intensity great enough to cause significant muscle damage after this period. The athletes that took the probiotic supplement experienced less decline in muscle performance after their strenuous training session. In other words, their muscles retained more strength after a muscle-damaging workout relative to those who took the placebo. These results confirmed the possibility of probiotics being helpful in the exercise recovery process after strenuous activity.
Weight Loss & Insulin Sensitivity
Supplementation with probiotics has produced several remarkable benefits to metabolic health. In various clinical studies, including the one from Imperial College of London and Nestlé Research Center, probiotics have lowered blood glucose, maintained insulin sensitivity, reduced BMI, promoted fat loss, and decreased liver damage markers. The presence of commensal bacteria in the gut is involved in energy balance & intestinal integrity, thereby controlling the athlete's health status & enabling them to perform at their best.
Increases Nutrient Absorption
Some foods might be very rich in nutrients, but if we can't absorb them from the gut, we can't utilize them in our bodies. No matter how clean & right kind of food you eat, you need the right amount of good bacteria's in your gut to help you absorb all the nutrients from it. Probiotics help improve the nutrient status by making more nutrients (such as B vitamins, iron, and other minerals) available to absorb from food. Some beneficial bacteria species also directly produce essential nutrients like folate and vitamin B12. In contrast, others degrade antinutrients such as oxalates, which would otherwise bind up calcium and other minerals in the gut.
This is the same reason why we have fortified our high performance multivitamin multi-mineral supplement Maximult with probiotics. When you ingest Maximult, the probiotics present in ideal amounts in the Maximult increases your body’s ability to absorb all the other vital micronutrients that are present. The precious vitamins and minerals do not go for a waste and are effectively absorbed by the body. Smart, isn’t it? 😊
Aid In Energy Production
Your body gets the energy from the nutrients and micronutrients from the food you eat, and your gut plays an essential role in absorbing these nutrients, as mentioned above. An imbalance in the gut microbiome could result in inflammation of your gut lining. This inflammation prevents proper nutrient absorption, leaving you deficient in essential nutrients that give you energy. Therefore, mending your gut and reducing inflammation in the gut via a high-quality probiotic supplement can improve your energy levels.
Also, inflammation in your gut can lead to a leaky gut when your gut lining becomes penetrable. In this case, larger food particles and pathogens can enter your bloodstream, which will trigger an immune response.
If your immune system is frequently in fight mode, this will affect your energy levels throughout the day as well. A good probiotic supplement can help repair and maintain a healthy gut lining, thus reducing the burden on your immune system.
Enhanced Amino Acid Uptake
The absorption of dietary protein in the gut depends on microbial and host digestion and utilization. The kind of protein can affect amino acid absorption, with animal proteins generally more efficiently absorbed than plant proteins. Contrarily to animal proteins, most plant proteins, such as pea protein, are incomplete proteins. Pea protein is deficient in methionine and contains much lower amounts of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), which play an essential role in preserving muscle health. Probiotic supplementation can be a crucial nutritional strategy to improve post-prandial changes in blood amino acids and overcome compositional shortcomings of plant proteins.
Bottom Line
Probiotics are present in a lot of food that we eat regularly, such as curd, cheese and bread. But, is it enough for an athlete to perform at their level best? Absolutely not! the reason being you can't identify the strains & the amount of probiotics you are intaking through food. Supplementing probiotics makes sure that your body is getting enough of the needed ones to get your gut healthy & help you perform at your very best. Consuming Maximult daily guarantees that you get the ideal amount of probiotic, and this ensures that the digestive system and body as a whole remain healthy and function at their 100% efficiency.
No gut, No glory!
