Probiotics - what you should know before purchasing

Please take some time and have a read.

Good health does NOT come from synthetic supplements. Physical health comes from eating right (of course that's not to mention how spiritual/mental health affects it and they are of course all interrelated!)

Many people wonder if probiotic pills or powders provide the same benefit as probiotic foods since they seem to be marketed in the same way - healthy bacteria for our guts.

However, live probiotic foods work significantly better because of their construction.

To get into the small intestine and colon, where they do the work of breaking down and processing food and powering up the immune system, the bacteria first have to move through the stomach, but the stomach is filled with acid designed to kill bacteria. When you eat a probiotic food, the food itself provides a protective armor that helps shield the friendly bacteria. It also speeds the transport out of the stomach, thus keeping the good bacteria intact. Probiotic pills are often trapped in the acids of the stomach, and the probiotics are killed before the body ever gets a chance to use them. So consuming probiotic foods, such as kefir, kombucha, and cultured vegetables, is MANY times more effective than taking pills.

Fermented vegetables are so, so much stronger than supplements.

Here’s a case in point: It’s unusual to find a probiotic supplement containing more than 10 billion colony-forming units. But when actually testing fermented vegetables produced by probiotic starter cultures, they had 10 trillion colony-forming units of bacteria.

Literally, one teaspoon of vegetables was equal to an entire bottle of a high potency probiotic! So clearly, you’re far better off using fermented foods.

Cultured foods are inexpensive and the logical way the body wants to receive these beneficial bugs. The pills and powders you're taking cannot colonise in your gut. You are dependent on them, hoping they're the right strains for you, forever. Not so with live foods! They will recolonise and grow and move and repair where needed. WIth synthetic versions - you must take them for life and, when you stop, all benefit stops.

Some clean up protein waste, others carbohydrate waste, others dairy, others raise or lower ph levels so others can survive, some kill yeast, and others help us digest our food so we can get the nutritional benefits from it, etc. Some bacteria's only job is to help other bacteria perform their job whatever that may be. They are a colony, they live together much like people live together in a city, each performing a separate task or job so that community can survive and flourish.

And don't forget to help feed these probiotics also with prebiotics!

We cannot possibly duplicate this in a pill or a powder.

Each person on the face of the earth has their very own bacteria in the digestive tract. How can a one-size-fits-all pill or powder provide to different people the same benefit if each and everyone of us is unique?

People with immune issues that make them TH2 dominant...they do not do well with with a certain probiotic strain. What strain is this and how can you know a baby does not have this issue without extensive testing when you recommend them for a baby?

Streptococcus Thermophilus is found in many formulas and retail probiotics It further increases TH2 cytokine production, which exacerbates issues with these people. They rather need probiotics that increase TH1 production such as. L. Casei, L. Plantarum, and B. Longum.

There is a common misconception among those that say to give babies probiotics for colic.

Each time the Probiotic powder bottle is opened, the contents are exposed to atmospheric contamination. The powder is oxidized, and is exposed to humidity as well as to some potential contaminants. The spoon used to measure the powder may also add to the contamination if it is not sterile, as well as adding moisture to the powder. For these reasons, deterioration of powder tends to be much more rapid.

Most probiotic supplements now contain several different cultures; many of these bacterial cultures have no safe-use history in human health and nutrition. These bacterial may be antagonistic to each other and may alter the gut flora in an undesirable way. So it should not be believed that if one bacterium is good, numerous cultures combined together are even better.

To the contrary; only a few select cultures have been proven beneficial and almost all the others are yet to be proven.

Additionally, when too many bacteria are combined in a formula or when they are combined without proper manufacturing precautions (i.e. growing, freeze drying the strains separately and ensuring they remain inert in the capsule/jar), the bacteria which are most powerful for human health can be overwhelmed by some of the strains that have questionable benefits for human health.

The packaging of sensitive probiotic products is crucial to their continued potency. Probiotics are “anaerobic” organisms, meaning they live in the absence of oxygen. Therefore, exposure of probiotics to oxygen decreases the stability of probiotic bacteria.

For this reason, eliminating oxygen from and injecting nitrogen into the storage bottles can enhance the stability of the probiotics. This makes glass a preferred container over plastic, which is somewhat porous. Probiotics packaged in plastic bottles can lose potency during storage.

Garden of life ring a bell here? Bought out by Nestle, plastic bottles...what else is in them? Look at the labels!

Some groups of people are known to be at risk for adverse effects resulting from probiotics — including people with impaired immune systems — but warning labels are rarely seen on probiotics, the researchers said.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, Dr. Sing Sing Way, a specialist in infectious disease in babies, and his colleagues at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital report that the immune systems of newborns are actively suppressed.

The experiments, which were done in a lab with mice and blood samples from human infants' umbilical cords, show that certain red blood cells, known as CD71 cells, rein in the newborn immune system. That could create a welcoming environment for beneficial microbes, the researchers say, in a way that an adult immune system can't.

The immune system is far more complicated then we have imagined. Do you really want to introduce enormous and unnatural amounts of lab-grown bacteria we don't fully understand and possibly upset this delicate balance for life?

Studies confirm that physiological benefits are strain-specific and only rarely apply to species...

You should be looking for a study that identifies bacteria that works for a specific problem. This is how supplements need to be used; Not as an everyday product to colonize the flora of a child's digestive tract in a way that we still don't fully understand.

You will get exactly what you need in the quantity you need it from living Foods.

Think about this: exactly what studies have you read on probiotics?

When is the yeast strain needed? Is it ever really needed?

Lactose intolerant? What about these kids? Exactly what strains do they need? Where is it most healthful to source them?

There is no secret to maintaining proper flora in your system. Eating homemade milk kefir/sauerkraut/kimchi is a good start, along with organic fermented vegetables and a good flax oil.

Additionally, you will want to eat lignan precursors found in such foods as flax seed (mentioned already), the cruciferous vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, Chinese cabbage, boc choi), spinach, carrots, millet and buckwheat). Lignan precursors, when metabolized by our probiotics, create chemicals that protect us. (I don't recommend you go wild on veg - it's designed to be an addition and not the main meal. More on this another time! If you actually read this far, ask me why I say this )

There was a man who was hired by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to study bacteria. His first investigation was on bifidus and its influence on e-coli.

Bifidus is passed to babies in mother’s milk. Mother’s milk is a key ingredient to a baby’s immune system. In children, bifidus is the primary probiotic in their system up to about the age of seven; then acidophilus becomes the dominant probiotic. There should, in a perfect world, be no interference to this order of things. When parents give kids under 7 probiotics they do not know or understand what they are messing with or how it can detrimental to the very thing they think they are helping - the digestive health of the child. If a baby is taken off mother’s milk and put on pasteurised cow’s milk, the bifidus count begins to drop, slowly at first, and then quickly. As the bifidus count drops, the e-coli count increases. By the time the colony of bifidus is depleted, the number of e-coli has gone from 10^7 to 10^14. This is NOT double. This is a multiplication of ten, seven times!

It was also found that at that amount (10^14), that the e-coli produced an “endotoxin” that stopped the heart and lungs for a period of time.

Do you see what’s going on here? It had been known that Sudden Death Syndrome was more prevalent in bottle fed babies than in mother’s milk fed babies, but now, in addition to the deaths caused by vaccines, there's been found another probable contributing factor.

He wrote up his findings and passed them to his higher ups. He never heard back from them. He arranged a meeting and it was then that he learned that his research was not going to be published. In effect, they told him, “Sure, like the USDA is going to go out and tell mothers not to feed their kids cow’s milk.”

He quit. He went on the road to get the news out. He gave lectures at any venue that would have him. This is how his story has been shared.

Food is where our kids true health comes from ask any one of those that say probiotics to explain to you exactly what each probiotic in the ones they take do for a child's immune system and you'll get no answers...when you do not know what it is you are taking you cannot research them. Hence you do not know the benefit or risk associated with them. You are at the mercy of the manufacture to take their word and they supply no studies..

"Give probiotics!" is a common "FB" remedy for everything, but if a probiotic is not even listed by genus strain and species .. You have no idea what you are ingesting or why.

Show me studies of how each probiotic interacts with others in the pill or powder recommended? If it cannot be proven they all interact favorably, how can they be promoted? There is no science that more is better.

Exactly what problem are each of the probiotics given for?

What strain does he/she need for what specific problem?

Digestion? Diarrhea? Eczema? Acne? Energy? What?

Are they guaranteed to expiration? Or only at manufacture?

Ask them what a lactose intolerant person needs?

To restore L-Acidophilus, those on a milk-free diet need to use the yeast, S. boulardii, that will convert any carbohydrate to lactic acid. Lactobacilli will live only in a lactic acid environment.

Virtually all bacteria, except for Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria, require iron for growth. The liver produces lactoferrin, an iron chelator, when challenged by infectious agents. Animals protect themselves from infection by making chemicals that bind iron so that the microbes cannot use it. These iron-binding proteins, called lactoferrin, are concentrated in human milk and are found inside human white blood cells. The high lactoferrin in human milk protects breast-fed infants against intestinal infection.. The high lactoferrin in human milk protects breast-fed infants against intestinal infection. Why then would you upset this delicate balance?

Some precursors to red blood cells are marked by the protein CD71. Doctors at the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati found that, in human umbilical cord blood and newborn mice, these cells make an enzyme called arginase-2 that actively inhibits the immune response. When they transferred immune cells from newborns into adult mice, they found that the cells themselves were fully functional and capable of ramping up an immune response in the adult environment. This shows that the key is how the immune cells are regulated, not whether the infant immune cells themselves are immature.

Why would infants be intentionally susceptible to infection? The answer comes from one of the hottest new fields in medical research—the microbiome.

The microbiome is science shorthand for all of the benign and beneficial microbes that live in our bodies, helping us digest food and keeping populations of pathogens in check so we don't get sick. In recent years, thanks to high-throughput DNA sequencing, scientists have learned just how vast and varied the microbes who call us home can be.

The several pounds of bacteria that you carry around every day play a complex role in your health, and ongoing research continues to explore the ways that the make-up of our microbiome might effect our susceptibility to everything from diabetes to cancer.

But babies are born without a microbiome because they've spent the past nine months in the sterile womb and their digestive system is a blank slate.

The first order of business in life, literally, is to start collecting one's bacterial community—babies swallow some of the microbes present along the vaginal canal, and that becomes the beginning of their microbiome. This isn't just an accident; research has shown that pregnant women's bodies actually change so that they host different types of bacteria in their vaginas. This may be an evolutionary adaptation to give the infant the best biome possible. Babies born through cesarean section miss out on establishing some of those key species according to research.

For their part, the infants seen to be tamping down their immune response to allow the beneficial bacteria to establish themselves.

Obviously, this also makes them more susceptible to infection from dangerous bacteria as well, so developing a healthy microbiome is a bit of a tradeoff. The authors of the Cincinnati hospital study call it "unfortunate by-product of the greater benefits of active suppression during this crucial developmental period, when tolerance to commensal microbes is more uniformly advantageous."

We still don't fully understand how they work in adults.

Your brain is just another organ that is affected by what goes on in the rest of your body.

Mayer also has been studying the effects of probiotics on the brain in humans. Along with his colleague, Kirsten Tillisch, Mayer gave healthy women yogurt containing a probiotic and then scanned their brains. He found subtle signs that the brain circuits involved in anxiety were less reactive, according to a paper published in the journal Gastroenterology. But Mayer and others stress that a lot more work will be needed to know whether that probiotic — or any others — really could help people feel less anxious or help solve other problems involving the brain.

http://www.everydayresearchmethods.com/…/do-gut-bacteria-sh…

messing with Nature in the form of something intended to Grow in them and is Still not fully understood is not a good idea in our infants regardless of what the marketing says.

There are some 500-1000 different microbials which inhabit and reproduce in the gut. THEY THINK>>>we know so little yet

some are only there transiently and therefore, to have a "healthy" gut (based upon our historical traditional cultures), we need to consume beneficial microbials regularly. Whole food probiotics more effectively remain viable until they reach the large intestine.

*Homemade milk kefir has 56+ different beneficial microbials strains.

*Water kefir has about 30 different beneficial microbial strains.

*Commercial store-bought milk kefir has about 10 different beneficial microbial strains, more than most bottle probiotics.

*freeze-dried Kefir "starters" have about 7 microbial strains. Get from a friend and make your own!

*Commercial yogurt has about 7 different beneficial microbial strains. (They add strains intentionally for benefit. Bifidum is one to look for, if you purchase commercial whole food probiotics.)

*Homemade yogurt strains vary, but each starter has somewhat limited different strains, usually about 5-7 different strains. Having different sources of microbials in our food is optimal.

Basically, most probiotics are not viable all the way to the gut, due to heat destruction during transportation and storage, acidity in the stomach, and low viability of powders and capsules. Commercial yogurts must have "Active Live Cultures".

I prefer whole foods which are naturally cultured or fermented: kefir or yogurt from cow, goat, coconut, homemade almond milk, hemp seed milk, etc. And fermented foods. Organic, live sauerkraut and dill pickles are easy to add to the diet.

"Homemade yogurt that is fermented for 24 hours, will have an average concentration of 3 billion cfu/mL of yogurt. If you were to eat a small bowl (500 ml) of 24 hour fermented homemade yogurt, you would receive 1.5 trillion beneficial bacteria -

100 times more bacteria than a 15 billion capsules. 15,000,000,000..amazing isnt it?

And homemade kefir has 5x that; homemade kimchi 10x that!

Dairy-free kefir, or any type of dairy could be made into kefir. And the kefir grains reproduce

Why 'Food' only for probiotics?

#1 because they ARE a food. Simple, isn’t it?

Some clean up protein waste, others carbohydrate waste, others dairy, others raise or lower pH levels so others can survive, some kill yeast, and others help us digest our food so we can get the nutritional benefits from it, etc. Some bacteria's only job is to help other bacteria perform their job whatever that may be. They are a colony, they live together much like people live together in a city, each performing a separate task or job so that community can survive and flourish.

We know far too little about them yet to mess with such a Vital part of our bodies.

We cannot possibly duplicate this in a pill or a powder.