Don’t we all want to look pretty and flawless? We take immense care of our skin by removing all the dust and other impurities from it. Women especially invest a lot in makeup and skincare, but what about the inner health? How much importance do we give to it? Let’s be honest to ourselves, we all hardly do much, except having a green tea after a hearty oily meal to detoxify our body or a stringent exercise routine.
Have you ever thought about your immune system which is the guardian of the body? Well neither did we till the time we met Mr. Minoru Shimada, MD, Yakult India. Yakult meant a milkshake to us before we sat down with them to understand what probiotics are and we realized that we had been missing one of the main nutrients for our well-being. Our intestine is the largest immune organ in the body and is very important for our health because it not only absorbs all the essential nutrients but also has 70% immune cells of the entire body present in it. Our immune cells are actually made in the bone marrows by stem cells. A whooping 70% of them gather and reside in the intestines and this is why we all should love our intestines the same way we love our outer beauty.
Now how do probiotics work? Well Mr. Shimada nicely cleared all our doubts and told us that, “probiotic is derived from the Greek word where “pro,” means “for” and “biotic” means “bios” or “life” so in short it means ‘for life’.”
Probiotics are essentially the live bacteria which are good for our health, especially the digestive system. We usually think of bacteria as something that causes diseases but our body has trillions of good and bad bacteria living in our intestines which weigh about 1.5 kg! And the balance between good and bad bacteria often gets disturbed because of bacterial infection, unbalanced diet, age, stress and even antibiotics so to combat the effects of bad bacteria, probiotics play a major role to suppress the number of bad bacteria and also help to activate a range of the body’s natural defense system.
In Indian households curd is often quite a staple food as it contains good lactic acid bacteria. This is the reason elderly people always emphasize on having curd during stomach infection. But curd as a probiotic is an old age theory as it contains different strains of Lactobacillus (good bacteria) which help in fermentation where as the health drink Yakult contains 6.5 billion unique probiotic (Lactobacillus casei Shirota, good bacteria) in each bottle.
Why one should consume Yakult, we asked Mr. Shimada and he took us through the brief history of the drink, “Launched in Japan in 1935 the probiotic strain in this fermented milk drink is scientifically proven to reach the intestine alive which tops up the existing level of good bacteria. So to maintain a healthy intestine, include a shot of Yakult to your daily diet which is World’s leading probiotic drink and helps improve your digestion and build immunity. So who can really consume Yakult? I have often heard people say it is for an upset tummy,” I asked. “Yakult is a probiotic drink which the whole family including kids above the age of one and pregnant women can have. Probiotics are about intestinal health and not restricted to any illness,” Mr. Shimada replied. With the times we have evolved and so has science, our favourite saying too needs to change from, ‘The family that eats together stays together but the family which drinks Yakult regularly stays healthy together’. After all health is wealth!
We understand that you still have few doubts about Yakult, just let us know and we will help you with the answers or simply log on to Yakult India.
