Comment · Tue, March 31, 2020
Any plans for probiotics?
Original post in this thread
AromaticAminoAcid · 11 points
I’d understand if you’re avoiding making them. Just wanted to check. I’ve been reading about some anaerobic strains that look quite promising.
What they were answering
TheGermanGuy21 · 2 points
May I ask, what's your take on this guide to probiotics? I've seen this mentioned and linked to on r/nootropics nearly everytime the topic of probiotics is brought up. The author claims that the only valuable probiotics are the few human-derived patented single-strain products he mentions (Culturelle, Align, Jarrow IBS, etc). His reasoning does make sense to me, but Visbiome would be food-derived strains if I understand this correctly, so I'm kinda confused now.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
His general premise is correct. Most out there are shit, or the data is not solid. It's one of the reasons we have not brought out our own. We only have a few prebiotics, like Epicor, and have been taking our time to determine which probiotics we would put our name behind. I only use Visbiome on occasion for specific things, like when I am on antibiotics. I have had good luck with it personally in those scenarios. I would not take it daily.
His message that there is not a one size fits all probiotic for everyone is also correct. Everyone is different, and it takes trial and error to find what works best for your individual case and body chemistry. That can be frustrating for a lot of people because of the time it takes to figure it all out. You will try a bunch of things that don't work, or make things worse, before you find one that is good for you.
As for the argument that food-derived strains are not valuable at all, and you need to stick to strains that are human-derived, I disagree. Saying something is a "human-derived strain" is rather vague and arbitrary. Even he says that Saccharomyces boulardii was the most beneficial, and that was originally extracted from fruit. So that's a food-derived strain. Does the original origin of a bacterial strain really matter, or should we look at the scientific evidence in humans?