Probiotics a Potential Treatment for Depression?

by Laura Heffner

According to UCLA researchers and a functional MRI scan of 36 women, they have discovered a possibility that probiotics may be a way to treat depression or at least they have the start of proof that it affects how the women reacted to anxiety.  Women who consumed probiotics twice daily for a month had reduced activity in areas of the brain that govern anxiety and emotional response where the control group, those who did not receive probiotics stayed stable or even increased in brain activity.

It seems over the last especially five years, probiotics have really become mainstream.  Treatment for this and for that.  If you take antibiotics, if you're stressed, if you have digestive disorders and a whole host of other reasons.  When you go to the store and check different yogurts or probiotic supplements, each one seems to have a different name all ending is "us".   Certain strains are developed to aid in marketing yogurt such as Activia.  I'm always a little suspicious of this technique and haven't found Activia to help me as much as the smiling commercial actors tell me it will.  Actually quite the opposite.  My body obviously does not approve of that strain. 

So many stressors on our systems.  Stress, drugs, illnesses, environmental conditions, chemicals in our water, in about everything we come into contact with.  I suppose fifty or so years ago, maybe there was no such a need for probiotics. You didn't run to the doctor right off for antibiotics, you toughed it out if you could.  Used home remedies to get you through unless you just couldn't fight it off.  Now, you can't stay home from work so you rush from the doctor rather than use up a week of sick time.  Those reports are doing themselves.  You have a promotion coming up.  People will think you are a sissy for staying home with an infection.  Even though you are spreading it probably to everyone else.  I suppose after several generations of this attitude, our body's natural flora and fauna have been taxed and our water supplies taxed with the overflow of drugs we put into our bodies.

Somehow this revelation that probiotics may help anxiety and depression isn't all that shocking.  This was how nature intended it as it was in the first place.