Feeling stressed is just common especially among the young adults and adults these days. Well, fret no more as a new study just showed that prebiotics might be the tool to cope with the daily stress most people are going through.
According to Science Daily, Professor Monika Fleshner and her team from the University of Colorado, Boulder found out in their study that was published in the Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience that prebiotics can actually help people with stressful situations through having better sleeping patterns. They further explained in the article that prebiotics actually aid in having better digestion which then results to a normal sleep.
Contrary to common belief, prebiotics aren't understood that much according to Neuro Science News. Most of the time, it is commonly mistaken to be the probiotics found in some dairy products. To distinguish the difference, prebiotics are actually the non-digestible fibers which become the food of the probiotics.
Dr. Agnieszka Mika, a part of Fleshner's team, imparted that stress usually affects the microbiome of the digestive system specifically in the gut. Their team wanted to know and test whether a diet which is high in prebiotics will calm down the disturbed microbiome.
The team from the University of Colorado, Boulder tested this hypothesis with laboratory rats. They created two different set ups, one with rats exposed to a stressful event and another one which served as the control. The researchers fed the rats in the first set up with prebiotics and this later on showed outstanding results. It was found out that these rats did not receive any disruption in their microbiome after the stressful event and they also had better sleeping patterns compared to the rats in the controlled set up.
Some people might find it sketchy to compare themselves to laboratory animals like rats, but Dr. Robert S. Thompson, the lead author of the study, clarified this misconception. Thompson said that the stressor that they used in the experiment is actually equivalent to stressful events among humans such as a death of a loved one. Despite this similarity, their team is still seeking to actually test it among humans to see whether it will also be beneficial to the stresses experienced by humans. Their team also clarified that having prebiotics in human's diet hasn't brought any adverse effects.
