The mainstream health world can”t seem to stop talking about probiotics supplements these days, throwing a lot of hype around these “miracle supplements” that are said by scientific studies to improve everything from the clarity of your skin to your energy levels to your ability to remain disease-free at all times. Even though probiotics research is promising the majority of consumers isn’t yet convinced about the usefulness of the various probiotic foods and products.

Probiotics are, in fact, living micro-organisms that exist in your digestive track. They aren”t inert minerals and vitamins, they are bacterium and yeasts that can grow and die and which exist in a symbiotic relationship in your gut. They are extremely small, thus the micro in micro-organism, and at any given moment your digestive track will house a countless number of them providing you with all the benefits of probiotics. Assuming, of course, that your digestive track is in good overall health.

There”s some speculation and little scientific evidence over how these micro-organisms came to live in our guts in the first place and how this symbiotic relationship formed. While we probably will never know the exact origin of this relationship we do have a good idea of how these organisms enter into our digestive systems on a day-by-day basis. We get a whole lot of them through our mother when we”re born, but on a daily basis we get them from the things we put in our mouths. Ancient man probably ate a lot of food that was dirty or far from sanitary which helped the process along, and traditional cultures put a huge emphasis on consuming large quantities of traditionally fermented foods like sauerkraut which were teaming with these helpful micro-organisms. As long as you”re eating a piece of food that hasn”t been completely sanitized and irradiated you”re probably consuming some of these organisms with everything you eat.

And that”s a good thing! Unfortunately modern diets are filled with overly processed foods that not only don”t contain any of these helpful organisms anymore but which are so processed they actively kill a lot of the good bacteria already living in our guts. Industrialized foods are difficult to digest and are filled with toxic chemicals that can devastate your digestive tracks” internal environment, which is one of the reasons they are so dangerous to consume in large quantities.

There are many different strains of probiotics out there and different foods and supplements provide them in different amounts. These strains include the popular Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacteria. For example yogurt and kefir may seem very similar to each other but they often feature substantially different probiotics profiles, and their probiotics profiles are going to be a lot different than the profile you”ll find in a good jar of raw sauerkraut. Eating a variety of probiotic-rich foods, drinking probiotics drinks, avoiding too many modern industrial foods, and taking a powerfully formulated probiotic supplement is a great strategy for making sure you always have enough of these helpful little micro-organisms in your stomach. They may be naturally occurring but in this day and age they need some help appearing in the right quantities, so do your part to help them flourish.