Re: Medical mystery - Why does probiotics cure my itchy acne / eczema?

Probiotics make certain B-group vitamins (for example Vitamins B2, B12, folic acid and biotin) and vitamin K in the gut. They also produce short chain fatty acids, which provide up to 5-10% of our total body energy requirements.
Lactobacillus acidophilus is critical in helping us to regulate our immune system. These friendlies do this by stimulating the maturation and balancing of the immune system at birth, but then go on to stimulate and prime the immune system right throughout our lives. This enables us to have a correct response to dietary and environmental allergens and also tolerance to our normal flora (i.e. so we can differentiate friend from foe).

Priming the immune system by taking in a good probiotic also allows our body to react quickly to potentially harmful challenges like pathogenic bacteria.

It is interesting you take 10 billion CFUs twice daily, this is the dosage recommended for skin conditions, and you are taking the correct amount. I'd like you in addition to take a good digestive enzyme as well, and think you will have even more benefit of the probiotic this way, because by facilitating digestion (stomach, pancreas and duodenum) you will be improving the pH further downstream and allowing the friendly bacteria to have even more food to consume and thereby improve their numbers (colonies) in a more natural sense. Also, don't forget to slowly include some fermented and cultured foods into your diet. That way you will ba able to stop supplementing your diet with those probiotics in time at the rate of 20 billion CFUs.

Some people maintain that you need to supplement probiotics "for the rest of your life", I disagree, and once you start to change your diet for the better and understand more about the ecology of the gut, you will be able to understand how foods can be your medicine and not dietary supplements. Tweet