Eddy's Good News: Wild horses for wildfire and how important our gut health really is

Virgin Radio

27 Jul 2023, 11:09

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Thursday 27th July 2023

Encouraging news from Spain and their new line of defence against wildfires, wild horses! With temperatures in Europe having soared and with much reported wildfires ravaging the beloved holiday destinations of many a Brit, you’d wonder how a horse could help and before you start questioning how they could handle a water pipe with those hooves, the defence against fires is more preventative.

The Iberian peninsula used to be home to huge herds of wild horses thousands of years ago. According to experts, they removed a lot of biomass from the land, grasses that would otherwise be fuel and help spread the fires. When the means for fire to spread has been eaten, the fire is more likely to stay localised and easier to control and extinguish. So they’ve introduced a breed called Przewalksi, who are the oldest living relatives of the original wild horses who roamed europe and asia in the time of StoneHenge. It’s a strategy that will work on multi levels.

The horses will create an environment that’s loved by apex predators like vultures and the iberian lynx, increasing biodiversity, all of them in turn improve soil health, and water retention, which again works against fires. Hooray for horses and the manes in Spain that stay mainly on the plain ;)

Via: positive.news

More amazing news about how our gut health is now linked to even more than we thought as a ground breaking study shows probiotics can positively affect cognitive decline associated with age.

Say hello to the University Of North Carolina, who gave a probiotic called Lactobacillus rhamnosus  to test subjects aged between 52-75 and who all lived with mild cognitive impairment in a double blind, placebo controlled trial, meaning that neither the researchers or the subjects knew which one received the probiotic.

The trial lasted three months after which they were retested and it turned out those who’d been given the probiotic showed a measurable change to their gut microbiome which correlated with an improvement in their cognitive test scores. We already know the majority of our immune system is governed by our gut microbiome, and that many markers associated with serious diseases of major organs and cancer begin with cellular inflammation caused by chemicals released in our gut which correspond to what we put in it…now we are discovering that even our cognition is linked, which opens up a whole new way to treat dementia in a more holistic way. Let’s have more research into this, it looks like a goldmine!

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org