Welcome to the Ask a Nutritionist podcast, brought to you by Nutritional Weight and Wellness.

We are thrilled to have you join us today as we discuss the connection between what you eat and how you feel

and share practical real-life solutions for healthier living through balanced nutrition.

Now let's get started.

Hello, and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's midweek

segment called Ask a Nutritionist. My name is Leah Kleintrod. I'm a registered and licensed

dietitian with nutritional weight and wellness. And on today's show, I will be answering a few

related questions that we received from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

This listener asks, can you give an outline of how to take a probiotic for overall good gut health when no underlying issues are present? Does it matter how many billions of CFUs it has, the number of strains it has, and should

those quantities be rotated or increased or decreased every couple of months?

And are there certain characteristics to look for when purchasing a probiotic?

So we will talk all about probiotics in the show today. These are wonderful questions. It's kind of a nice

grouping of questions that I think will help a lot of people because I've had lots of questions

over probiotics over the last couple of years. So probiotics are a really popular health topic. And

if you, I mean, if you poke your head into Google or the

internet at all, you'll see that research really in the last 15 to 20 years or so has shown that

the health of our gut and the health of our microbiome or everything that kind of makes up

bugs that are in our gut, these things have

far-reaching effects on the rest of the body. So it certainly makes sense even if we don't

struggle with any kind of digestive symptoms or with a chronic health condition that we'd

still want to keep our gut, you know, tuned up, should we say, and just try to keep that gut as

healthy and as happy as we possibly can. You know, before we get too much into some of those

...