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11th Newsletter
Probing the hype of probiotics
Hope or hype?
Take a walk through your local food store and you can't miss the tiny bottles of probiotic drinks, kefir, kombucha and yogurt packs stacked up, extolling the benefits of "active cultures” to keep your gut running smoothly.
Just like bacteria, they're everywhere.
That is just what they are.
Probiotics are live bacteria meant to reshape your body's native community of microbes, known as the microbiome.
Probiotic die-hards claim a never-ending array of potential benefits, from improved digestion to a stronger immune system; with some going as far as suggesting they boost our mood and mental health.
The probiotics we typically see in food shelves are made with the aid of bacteria and often contain live microbes which are purified and packaged as supplements.
The hope is that once probiotic bacteria reach the gut, they produce and respond to molecules from our existing gut bacteria and our own cells in a way that makes us healthier!
The Hype
The reason probiotics have garnered such interested is because there is lots of research suggesting that the bacteria in our guts can digest insoluble and produce essential nutrients that shape our immune system and keep us clear from disease-causing bacteria.
For example, patients infected with Clostridium difficile -- a bacterium that can cause severe diarrhoea and bowel inflammation -- improved when their guts were colonized with stool samples (and thus bacteria) from healthy donors!
The long term future of probiotics and what they can offer is exciting but sadly we are NOT there yet.
Scientists do not know enough about the microbiome yet to orchestrate and create a bespoke probiotic regimen for an individual to help combat disease and keep us healthy.
There are lots of unknowns; for one, we don’t know how to pick the right strain for the right person and get it to flourish. Our guts are harsh environments for bacteria to settle in and from an evolutionary standpoint that is favourable as it reduces the risk of disease-causing microbes finding a new home inside us.But it also means the probiotics will probably go in one end and come out the other!
In fact, a large part of whether a probiotic ‘works’ or not depends on an individual’s existing microbiome; which varies greatly even between identical twins!
Probiotics 2.0
Research continues to investigate how gut bacteria communicate with each other and our bodies, potentially leading to new and improved probiotics.
Some people (my parents included) swear by probiotics. Who knows – they may end up being right.But we don’t exacrtly know the names of the right strains to use for each individual and for what reasons we need them. So it’s not a precise science.
What I would recommend in the meantime is a diet rich in plants and fibers and fermented foods! (feed those bacteria!)
And don’t worry too much about over the top spending on fancy branded, organic culture pots and the like that promise far more than they deliver with our limited science at this point in time!