Welcome to our Educational Resource (E-Source), an informative newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on current nutritional supplement information and gives you advice about use and effectiveness from a physician.

In this issue, we cover the latest research about probiotics and their effect on the immune system. Live bacteria, such as those found in some yogurts and kefir, help the body digest food and guard against infection. But did you know the intestines are a critically important battleground for your immune system? Probiotic bacteria actually help keep you well. Learn more about these powerful creatures and how they may be used to treat allergies in the future.

Those who have studied probiotics know how important they are in terms of keeping our GI tract, and therefore us, healthy. 1) They make a number of vitamins for us, such as vitamin K, biotin, and pantothenic acid. 2) They also make butyrate, a short chain fatty acid, which the large intestinal cells use preferentially for energy. 3) By growing and multiplying, the bacteria create soft, easy to pass stools, in as much as our stools are more bacteria than they are food residue. 4) By probiotics occupying biological niches in our system, pathologic bugs find that they do not have a place to live and grow and thus pass out of the system without causing trouble. This list alone is enough to compel us to add probiotic bacteria to our diet daily. New research is finding that probiotics have a startling role in the regulation of our immune system.
 
All animals with intestinal tracts, including humans, have lived peacefully with probiotic bacteria since the beginning. It is a perfect symbiotic relationship: we give them a place to live and grow; they perform the benefits enumerated above. We do not digest the food they eat, and they do not like the food we use. Probiotic bacteria use fiber as their food, something that we lack the enzymes to digest.

As a result of living with these bacteria for so long, our immune system knows that it should not mount a violent defense against these organisms. Instead, the bacteria stimulate a non-excitatory immune pathway that calms the immune system down. In asthma and allergic disease, the immune system reacts to substances that should otherwise be benign. Pollens, dust mites, and molds fall into this classification. There is really do need for the body to respond to these substances, unless the immune system is reacting in a hyperactive way.

Even more interesting is the news that these same probiotic bacteria teach the immune system to ignore these harmless substances in our environment by stimulating, not excitatory immune pathways, but suppressive pathways. Allergy shots are the current way allergists try to teach the immune system to stop over-reacting to certain allergens. These are typically given as shots in the arm. However, the immune system is not concentrated in the skin but in the gastrointestinal system. More than 70% of our immune system is concentrated along our gut, for that it where we truly interact with our environment, taking in nutrients and taking out the trash. It just makes sense that if we are trying to make the immune system behave in a certain way, we go to where the immune system is, that is our gut. This news is exciting because we already have tools and helpers ready to do this job for us, our normal commensual probiotic bacteria.

A completely new line of research into modulating the immune system is to coat probiotic bacteria with certain allergens such as cedar pollen, and to feed them to patients suffering from those allergies. If this line of research proves as promising as I believe, you will begin to see allergy shots pass into oblivion as these new oral forms of allergy control become commonplace.

In the meantime, I have added probiotics to my list of recommended daily vitamins and supplements, especially if you have any sign of hyperactivity of the immune system, such as allergies, asthma, urticaria, as well as any autoimmune disease. My recommendation is Probiotic HLC High Potency Powder (1/3 tsp) or Probiotic HLC High Potency Capsules (1) daily with meals. If you are showing any signs of dysbiosis (which means having the wrong bacteria in your system), such as gastric distress, gas, bloating, or diarrhea, I would recommend these same probiotics with each meal until your symptoms disappear.