Believe it or not, you eat organisms that are alive almost every day. You even keep many of them in your cupboards and fridge.
Several scientific inquiries have discovered that eating these organisms can lower your blood pressure and cholesterol.
Therefore, you should load up as much as you can on them.
Probiotics are bacteria that encourage the growth of more bacteria in your digestive tract.
Yes, your intestines are crammed with bacteria, and many of them are quite unhealthy. This is why you need to consume probiotics: good bacteria that crowd out the bad bacteria that are already growing in your intestines.
Probiotics are already known to have numerous health benefits.
In fact, the first study demonstrating the blood pressure-lowing effects of probiotics was performed in 1974.
One of the first well-controlled blood pressure studies was published in 1995. It concluded that 95ml of sour milk daily, for a duration of eight weeks, could reduce both systolic and diastolic blood pressure by around 10 and 5 mmHg, respectively.
This is almost as much as most blood pressure medications, but without having to deal with any of the side effects.
Recently, Chinese researchers reviewed 14 studies with a combined total of 702 participants, all of whom were fed sour milk.
They discovered an average reduction of 3.1 mmHg across these studies.
One study on mice found that the consumption of probiotics for a period of just seven days could reduce cholesterol by 38% and triglycerides by 40%. Studies on humans also found these reductions to be around 10%, which is still a massive reduction.
So, if you want to garner the benefits from probiotics, you have several options.
You can consume a lot of dairy and fermented products. This is ideal for both omnivores and vegans. Omnivores can get a lot of their probiotics from yogurt and kefir, while vegans would need to focus on tempeh and miso. Other great sources include sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, bread made with sourdough starters, and almost any form of pickled food.
If you don’t like fermented food, or if you follow an alkaline diet that forbids dairy and fermented food, you can buy probiotic supplements. However, you must ensure that they contain probiotic strains like lactobacillus, strep, thermophilus, E. faecium, L. acidophilus, and so forth. These are the strains that scientists have found to be effective in relieving blood pressure.