The connections between intestinal health and other parts of the body such as the psyche or the immune system are becoming increasingly clear. When it comes to colds, there are people who are not helped by over the counter products, but intestinal bacteria!
The problem of the annual “flu wave” is not so much the fact that thousands of real flu cases occur, but that millions of people are not at their workplace for about three days a week. In Germany, there are about 200 million cases of the flu every year.
The calculated damage to the economy caused by sick leave in Germany is 29.9 billion euros.
Those who come to work despite being sick have a third less energy and that on an average of 11.6 days a year. By the age of 75, the average citizen has experienced 200 days of colds. Over 200 different viruses, against which one can protect oneself only with difficulty, are to blame for it.
Probiotic prevention
Most people wish they weren’t sick in the first place. Primarily because of the quality of one’s life and also the economy would cheer. It loves the idea of “prevention as an active cure”.
This is also of which a researcher dreams. The results are quite clear and encourage more research. A Croatian study by the Zagreb Children’s Hospital with 281 children who received probiotics daily in a concentration of 10 billion colony-forming germs over a period of 3 months goes in this direction.
It was found that the strain Lactobacillus GG leads to a significant decrease in the occurrence and duration of colds caused by viruses in children. The most important are: cold, hoarseness, sore throat, laryngitis, vocal cord irritation, inflammation of the middle ear, sinusitis, and cough.
12 weeks of probiotic supplementation reduced the frequency of colds by 12% and the number of sick days by 2.5 per year.
A further study from Lund in southern Sweden, which also included a control group (randomised, double blind) without probiotics, used two lactobacillus strains (L. plantarum, L. paracasei) in high doses (10 billion colony-forming germs) for 12 weeks and achieved a 12% reduction in the frequency of colds compared to the placebo group. A total of 272 persons were examined.
Also pleasing: the number of sick days decreased from an average of 8.6 by about 2.5 days to 6.2 days. Impressive enough to deduce from this that probiotics have what it takes to protect us from colds to a relevant extent.
Similarly promising results for the use of probiotics have already been suggested by studies for smokers, athletes, and neurodermatitis in children.
