Popular gut probiotic completely craps out in randomized controlled trial

arstechnica.com Popular gut probiotic completely craps out in randomized controlled trial

If you’re familiar with the history of Activia, you may not be surprised.

In a randomized controlled trial, the probiotic Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis—used in many probiotic products, including Dannon's Activia yogurts—did nothing to improve bowel health in people with constipation, according to data from a randomized triple-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.

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Stomach acid is meant to kill anything, whether it’s a pathogen or beneficial probiotic. Yogurt’s probiotics shouldn’t survive the stomach if all is going well.
I had severe gut dysfunction due to multiple parasites and pathogens from spending a year in India. I had dysbiosis, IBS-C and SIBO all diagnosed, and for five years I developed a debilitating autoimmune condition that made eating nearly impossible without intense systemic inflammation, brain fog, body pain, etc.
In addition to multiple pill based probiotics I did literally every home fermentation project I could figure out; kraut, kimchi, yogurt, kefir, etc. None of them helped one bit. I eventually took a double capsule probiotic designed to survive the stomach intact and open in the small intestine and my symptoms were mostly resolved within a week.
I wish this was more common knowledge. We are just starting to understand how crucial gut health is to overall health, including mental health, and basically everyone gets their gut biome carpet bombed with antibiotics on the regular.
- Stomach acid is meant to kill anything, whether it’s a pathogen or beneficial probiotic. Yogurt’s probiotics shouldn’t survive the stomach if all is going well.
  This is misinformation.
  I had SIBO
  Not likely. https://humanmicrobiome.info/sibo/
  You're getting your information from poor quality sources.
  I eventually took a double capsule probiotic designed to survive the stomach intact and open in the small intestine and my symptoms were mostly resolved within a week.
  Almost certainly placebo or random luck. There are a plethora of probiotic and FMT studies that show it can have significant impacts when you take it directly orally:
  https://humanmicrobiome.info/fmt/
  https://humanmicrobiome.info/probiotic-guide/
  We are just starting to understand how crucial gut health is to overall health, including mental health, and basically everyone gets their gut biome carpet bombed with antibiotics on the regular.
  Agree. I've done FMT from 15+ donors and haven't yet reversed the damage from antibiotics. When I would share studies about this on reddit I would get viciously attacked by people who seemed addicted to antibiotics.
  
  I appreciate you sharing this information. What you’ve shared seems accurate to our current scientific consensus. You’re right that some probiotics and pathogens survive the stomach.
  Honestly I did my best to research my condition but my mind was functioning quite poorly at the time and most doctors were of no help. Once I got better I may have drawn an inaccurate conclusion as to why the prior probiotics I had taken hadn’t helped whereas this one (Seed) worked so miraculously. It could simply be that the strains in that particular probiotic helped rebalance things for me whereas everything I had tried prior were not what I needed. Maybe those particular strains my gut was needing don’t survive the stomach environment well.
  The probiotic that resolved my symptoms almost certainly was not placebo. That I was lucky I can agree with.
  I’m sorry you’re still trying to heal your gut despite your thorough knowledge and FMT. It’s been a few years I’ve felt mostly better but I still don’t have the energy levels I did.
  Antibiotics are miraculous but not a panacea and are definitely overprescribed and used unjudiciously in livestock.
  I wish you the best on your healing journey. Thanks for sharing good information.
- Inject yoghurt up my bum, gotcha
- Can u recommend the probiotic you used? Thanks
  
  I'm not the person you replied to, but I recently recovered from a multi-month case of acute gastritis and I felt that the Culturelle OTC probiotic pill regimen I took helped
  
  It was Seed. Feel free to read the studies they’ve done and draw your own conclusions on the effectiveness of their double capsule. I only have my own experience and that of my nephew that Seed has helped both of us recover from debilitating symptoms that were not addressed by fermented foods or other probiotics.
- https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=does+stomach+acid+kill+all+bacteria
  i mean it certain kills a lot but might not something useful be left over? how would we test for that
  
  Stomach acid doesn’t kill all bacteria or pathogens. That’s how I got whipworm, roundworm, E. coli and giardia from food in India. Some bacteria may be more or less susceptible to the stomach environment. It looks like tests have shown some probiotics do tend to survive the stomach.

A couple of years back I read of a study which concluded that because we are all so unique, there is no one size fits all probiotic. It's a crap shoot if you want to find one that works for you.
- Also there are supposed to be whole probiotic worlds in our gut. One species is nothing.
  
  Clostridium difficile has entered the gut
  
  I don't fully agree with this. There is a whole actual world (this planet), but one species is all it takes to destroy it.
- “Crap shoot….”
  I see what you did there.

Given the statistically significant results of fecal transplants... have we tried shoving the yoghurt into the the other end?
- New fetish unlocked!
- Some people have. It doesn't work like that. Don't put food or probiotics up your butt. FMT can be taken orally.

What a headline
- really started it on a brown note

TF is triple blind? I'm familiar with blind (participant) and double blind (participant + experimenter), but who the hell is the third person?
- Per Google, "In a triple-blind study, the assignment is hidden not only from participants and experimenters, but also from the researchers analyzing the data."
  
  Daaaaaaamn that is so interesting.. Thanks for the info (I'm a statistician IRL so I'm literally the third person I was wondering about lol)
- Secondary control group?

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