Retain your gains: probiotics—think friendly bacteria—protect your muscle, heal your gut and boost your energy

Eating live bugs sounds like something an 8-year-old would do on a dare, yet a goodly number of self-willed adults are supplementing their diets with armies of creepy little critters. Not the spiders and caterpillars you swallowed (temporarily) in the third grade, but microscopic bacteria that help you maintain healthy digestion and prevent toxic invaders from taking over your intestines. Oddly enough, they can also play a decisive role in muscle gains.

In fact, your GI tract is already crawling with probiotics, a living colony of approximately four pounds of friendly microflora lining the walls of your digestive system. These good guys tend to outnumber the pathogenic bacteria that are naturally present as well, but the latter can flourish when the former get KO'd by lifestyle changes or viral and bacterial infections. You can also upset the ratio between good and bad bacteria with an excessive use of antibiotics, exposure to X-rays or radiation therapy, eating too many refined sugars, or drinking too much chlorinated water. And stress or poor nutrition can knock your innards for a loop, resulting in a condition known as dysbiosis, a term that literally means "a life out of balance." Symptoms include diarrhea, gas and other gastrointestinal troubles.

Tossing back extra probiotics via certain supplements and foods does more than merely correct this imbalance. According to Kenneth Bock, M.D., author of The Road to Immunity, noshing bacteria can also lead to an increased resistance to infectious diseases, less-frequent allergy attacks, lower blood pressure and cholesterol counts, and a healthier digestive system.

That's good news for the fitness-minded guy. "The more efficiently you digest your food, the more effectively that food will be converted into energy, which translates to a better workout," Bock says. "A healthy digestive tract also means easier muscle growth and repair."

Bock says that gaining lean muscle mass is more work with an unhealthy GI tract. "Your colon, stomach and small intestine digest food and absorb nutrients. If either of these processes is hindered, it can result in a loss of nutrients, which your body borrows from skeletal muscle."

Besides keeping your muscles from turning into a lending bank, a good supply of healthy bacteria makes protein more readily available to your muscles, and burns fat more easily, according to James Collier, R.D., who runs the Muscletalk.co.uk Web site. Because probiotics help prevent intestinal infection, Collier notes that your body is more likely to absorb more and better nutrients with a pumped-up dose.

GUT MORNING

Probiotics are most commonly sold as milk-based products, such as yogurt. Indeed, it's increasingly difficult to purchase yogurt that doesn't contain strains of probiotic bacteria such as Lactobacillus acidophilus or bifidobacteria. Probiotics are also available at the health-food store in powder, tablet or capsule form.

There's no formal recommended dosage of probiotics, but Bock believes that a daily serving of yogurt will help maintain a better bacterial balance. And once you've achieved that balance, it's not a bad idea to start nurturing it.

"Just like hard-working athletes, probiotics are living things that get hungry," Bock says. "The more nourishment they receive, the healthier they'll be."

Bock recommends nondigestible plant sugars (a.k.a. fructooligosaccharides) as a supplement for happier guts. Known as prebiotics, these neosugars allow friendly bacteria to perform well and multiply. Prebiotics are found naturally in bananas, peaches, leeks, garlic, onions and artichokes. There are also commercial prebiotics, like FOS Powder, which passes through the stomach and small intestine and feeds good bacteria to the colon.

Whatever form you choose, Collier suggests ingesting probiotics first thing every morning. "When you wake up, you've been in a fasting state for several hours," he says. "Putting probiotics into an empty stomach prepares it for digesting the foods you're about to eat." Collier usually helps himself to a second dose of probiotics just before the evening meal, to correct any imbalance his system may have endured from a missed lunch or a stressful commute.

It's a habit that's catching on. American consumers are spending about $120 million on probiotics every year, so swallowing live bugs may not be as crazy as it sounds.

"Taking probiotics isn't revolutionary," Collier says. "In recent years, doctors have discovered that maintaining a healthy gut flora really does make a difference to your health. It's a simple equation: If you get enough good bacteria, like lactobacilli in yogurt, you can suppress the bad ones. And that's always a good idea."

PROBIOTICS TO GO

You can find probiotics in most nonfrozen yogurt and in acidophilus milk, or in the following products found at health-food stores and pharmacies.

* Probiotics 12 Plus is an organic capsule that blends 12 strains of lactic-acid bacteria to help maintain pH balance in the colon and fight E. coli. (www.buyprobiotics.com)