12-21-2012, 12:00 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-21-2012, 12:19 AM by Tenet Nosce.)
Also remember anything that has been pasteurized has no living organisms left in it. :-/ For many good reasons, the regulations on food production are all aimed at reducing the amount of bacteria in a food. However, this is problematic when it comes to fermented items. Best to make them at home.
One of the tests I run most frequently looks at levels of gut bacteria. It includes the "Adiposity Index" which is the ratio of two different groups of gut bacteria that can contribute to increased caloric extraction from food. Here is a link to the interpretative guide, which has some explanation on Page 8. http://www.metametrix.com/files/test-men...cts-ig.pdf
The big take home message here is that the vast majority of probiotic formulas in retail stores have a heavy dominance of Lactobacillus over Bifidus. Many formulas have no Bifidus, whatsoever. That means for those who have a high "Adiposity Index" most store-bought probiotic formulas will actually make the situation worse, not better.
As with many things, people tend to pick up on the buzz around probiotics, and incorrectly assume they are all the same, so they just pick whatever off of the shelf- usually the cheapest formula. What is worse, when people ask their doctors they are usually encouraged to buy Culturelle, or a similar probiotic product made by drug manufacturers. These tend to have only a single strain or maybe two, and at a very low dose (~1 Billion CFU). The professional-grade probiotics I use in my practice come anywhere from 10 billion up to 200 billion per dose.
One of the tests I run most frequently looks at levels of gut bacteria. It includes the "Adiposity Index" which is the ratio of two different groups of gut bacteria that can contribute to increased caloric extraction from food. Here is a link to the interpretative guide, which has some explanation on Page 8. http://www.metametrix.com/files/test-men...cts-ig.pdf
The big take home message here is that the vast majority of probiotic formulas in retail stores have a heavy dominance of Lactobacillus over Bifidus. Many formulas have no Bifidus, whatsoever. That means for those who have a high "Adiposity Index" most store-bought probiotic formulas will actually make the situation worse, not better.
As with many things, people tend to pick up on the buzz around probiotics, and incorrectly assume they are all the same, so they just pick whatever off of the shelf- usually the cheapest formula. What is worse, when people ask their doctors they are usually encouraged to buy Culturelle, or a similar probiotic product made by drug manufacturers. These tend to have only a single strain or maybe two, and at a very low dose (~1 Billion CFU). The professional-grade probiotics I use in my practice come anywhere from 10 billion up to 200 billion per dose.