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The "good bacteria," or probiotics, that fill the pomegranate drink are everywhere these days, in pills and powders marketed as super supplements. Probiotics are said to improve digestive and immune health. They're touted as potential treatments for conditions ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to eczema to tooth decay. Some marketing campaigns even hint that they can prevent the flu.
Scientific evidence, however, does not necessarily support those claims.
Studies in rodents and small groups of humans point to possible health benefits of consuming probiotics. But there have been only a few large human trials — in large part because Food and Drug Administration rules have dissuaded food companies and federally funded researchers from conducting the types of studies that could confirm, or refute, the proposed benefits of consuming "good" microbes.
http://www.statnews.com/2016/01/21/probiotics-shaky-science/
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:16PM
The fundamental question of what is it, was not asked in the article, although its a good question.
In the regular supplement industry, its known that whats on the label only tangentially occasionally relates to what the chemists and DNA sequencers find when they break retail purchased capsules open, especially from big box stores selling Chinese products. A classic example was the ginkgo biloba study a few months back where tablets contained all kinds of interesting plant matter, none of which has anything to do with ginkgo biloba. Which also has some impact on efficacy statistics seeing as researchers usually test with the real thing but retail customers mostly get placebos.
With probiotics its even worse, because there isn't "the" or "a" probiotic species. Nor a standard dose rate, so hard to say if you're getting a megadose or homeopathy.
So you're just kinda eating... something. But you don't know what, or how much of it. And based on news reports of the regular supplement industry all you really know for certain is its probably NOT what the label says. That doesn't sound terribly wise. And that leads directly to even more efficacy statistic problems, because you're selecting for users who refuse to think logically about what they eat, the stereotypical would rather die than think types, and they might have disease issues that statistically correlate strongly with stupidity and have nothing to do with either whats in the pills or whats on the label.
We do live in a weird second patent medicine era. Its very strange.
Then pile up an even weirder level where nobody cares. All the government wants to do is take away freedom and add taxes, control, regulations, and election fund donations, so they have no interest in fixing it, the corporations like patent medicine profits, and the purchasers just want a placebo. I don't anticipate things getting better any time soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:32PM
So I figured WTH I would give one of these probiotic diets a try. I knew it would not do much I was just being a goof.
2 bottles of pills that did nothing. The real 'diet' was in the paperwork that came with it. "stop eating sugar for 1 month". Ah I see they are trying to tie the pills to the weight loss but the real weight loss comes from less carbs.
Tossed out the remainder of the pills. Doing lower sugar, lower carb and more exercise, then I lost weight. Who would have guessed.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:44PM
And low carb is, itself, only an easy mental wrapper on the general function of eating fewer calories. You see a lot of claims about ketosis and how it causes weight loss, but these effects tend to be marginal compared to the calorie-cutting effect.
Carbs are an easy way to get a lot of calories fast, only pure oils and fats are faster. And unlike oils and fats, normal carb consumption includes eating them in near pure form.
Once you cut out carbs like bread, rice, potatoes, and sugar, the remaining options are either low-calorie or meat.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:54PM
That was sort of my point. It was basically a low carb diet. Not a 'pill' diet. Like I said I was being a goof and doing a 'wth' trial. I knew it would not work.
Once you cut out carbs like bread, rice, potatoes, and sugar, the remaining options are either low-calorie or meat.
Very good points. Another one I would like to make is 1 calorie of sugar is not the same as 1 calorie of meat. Your body will snork up the sugar quickly. The meat takes time for you to digest and by the time it is at the intake level it is much less than 1 calorie. The way a calorie is calculated is sort of misleading. We basically set something on fire and boil water then measure the time. It is a 'good' correlation but a rather imperfect one.
Also many people do not do much credence to the relation of weight vs age. As you age your body changes. Its ability to process food changes. Also your activity levels may change too. You need to keep that in mind. This does not hold true in all cases but it is there. For example in my family in their late 40s to mid 50s weight gain becomes an issue. Up until then they are relativity skinny. So finding a good diet does mean rolling with changes as you age too.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:57PM
Glycemic index is indeed a thing, but it's not particularly important to weight-loss. It can matter a fuck-ton if you're a diabetic.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 27 2016, @05:47PM
with everyone being fat and diabetic or pre-diabetic, doesn't that boil down to "everyone" anyway? Its not like low GI foods would impair a skinny athlete anyway.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 27 2016, @05:56PM
Its ability to process food changes. Also your activity levels may change too.
I've noticed this with my own low carb experiments, where crap tier food like a stereotypical thanksgiving dinner with 500 grams of carbs minimum makes me feel tired but a nice low carb meal and I've got tons of energy.
You starve yourself on a high carb diet and you feel starved, exhausted, lay on couch and watch TV.. get fat. You starve yourself on low carb diet and feel like you drank an extra cup of tea, go out hiking, take the kids to the park and run around.. get thin. Then some dude tells you "its just calories in equals calories out" yeah sure, but there's this slight subjective difference, like the difference between feeling like a refugee looks vs feeling ten years younger, as if that has no impact on the likelihood of the diet's long term success.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2016, @07:27PM
A chunk of carbon probably has a very high calorie number. However, my bodies absorption of it is probably very low.
My wildly wrong point is I personally use calorie as a rough gauge of what is going on. Next stop is the carbs. Next stop after that is the ingredient list. What ticks me off to no end is the number of different names for sugar and the substitutes that are equivalent to sugar.
If you come across something where 1 serving is 1500 calories. Something is going on (probably not good). The devil is in the details. Also the dosage makes the poison. It is sort of like smoking. 1 cigarette is not going to instantly give you stage 3 lung cancer. 2 packs a day every day for 25 years probably will.
And tonight I am eating at 5 guys. I am a sucker for good fries (damn you potato sugar carbs!!! :) ).
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday January 28 2016, @05:41AM
True, but not exactly.
First, carbs promote overeating. One gets hungry again very soon after say rice or potatoes, while fat takes more time to digest. For me it is almost impossible to overeat meat.
Second, one can eat say lean chicken, non-fat greek yoghurt and so on bringing down animal fat intake - the biggest argument against Atkins.
Third, whatever calorie deficit is easily replaced by better fats - nuts, avocado, olive oil.
The bottom line, it's much easier to cut carbs than to keep so called low calorie balanced diet.
Besides, most carb foods are carcinogenic, especially whole bread, fries, cookies - basically anything starchy cooked at high temps (acrylamide is known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity in the state of California:)
Oh, and speaking of reproductive, carbs at night bring testosterone way way down.
Government or doctors on the other hand will never recommend it simply because there are not enough food out there without carbs.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2016, @06:10AM
"One gets hungry again very soon after say rice or potatoes [...]"
—https://abcnews.go.com/Health/10-filling-foods-weight-loss/story?id=21153507 [go.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:59PM
I associated probiotics not with pills but with kombucha, sauerkraut/kimchi, and yogurt. You know, products with billions of bacteria floating around in them.
Does eating Lactobacillus colonized foods help you? Maybe. But many yogurt products have a ton of added sugar.
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(Score: 2) by quixote on Wednesday January 27 2016, @08:23PM
If they aren't, you have bigger problems than bad bacterial flora in your large intestine.
What affects the ecology of bacteria in the colon is the contents of the colon. That's composed of undigested food such as different kinds of fiber, the breakdown products of digestion, digestive acids from the liver, breakdown products from the bacteria living there, and so on.
The reason yoghurt and sauerkraut and fibrous food help is not because of the bacteria they contain. Those (you hope!) got killed in the stomach. They help because by the time you've finished digesting them, what's passing through the large intestine is conducive to the growth of bacteria associated with good health.
Changing diet can change intestinal ecology drastically, so, yes, what you eat matters for that. But not in the sense that eating, say, Lactobacillus acidophilus somehow makes it all the way to the colon and starts a "good" colony.
It is possible to introduce specific strains of bacteria to the colon, but it's done from the other end and is called a fecal transplant. And, yes, there's very interesting research coming out showing that changing intestinal ecology can have far-reaching effects on health and disease.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 27 2016, @08:36PM
Are you sure Lactobacillus can't survive the stomach? They do excrete acid after all.
Well, I looked it up and it turns out THEY CAN:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1489325/ [nih.gov]
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/73/2/399s.full [nutrition.org]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1151822/ [nih.gov]
See bolded portion and compare to:
I was about to say that effects could be seen before anything reaches the stomach. For example, bacteria in the mouth affect tooth decay, and tooth decay is linked with heart disease (I'm not sure about the causality).
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2016, @09:33PM
Just because some bacteria is good for your gut doesn't mean it's also good for your teeth.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 27 2016, @09:56PM
Every part of your body has different kinds of bacteria living on it. The microbiome is necessarily a complex subject
It means that the introduction of certain bacteria could be considered an oral health treatment.
On the subject of bacteria good for your gut being good for your teeth, I found this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897872/ [nih.gov]
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(Score: 2) by quixote on Friday January 29 2016, @11:18PM
Interesting! And good news for those of us trying to improve our large intestine bacteria.
It is still true, though, that the largest effect on those bacteria is the environment they're given. If your diet is meat+sugar, just as an extreme example, the occasional dose of probiotics won't help much. If you have one of those healthy Mediterranean diets they're always on about, you'd be very likely to have good intestinal flora without any added probiotics. (Although yoghurt is or can be part of that diet, so there's that.)
Anyway, cool to learn something new with good links to sources. :D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2016, @09:41AM
I associated probiotics not with pills but with kombucha, sauerkraut/kimchi, and yogurt. You know, products with billions of bacteria floating around in them.
Yup, thought the pills were just for emergencies
Does eating Lactobacillus colonized foods help you? Maybe. But many yogurt products have a ton of added sugar.
It is practically impossible to get good food off the shelf these days. The latest generation of food scientists and actuary run businesses have made sure of that. Most cultured food is ridiculously easy to make at home and isn't very time consuming, can fit into any lifestyle.
Check out a book by Sandor Katz. The man is a genius.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2016, @06:05PM
If you are interested in inclusion of more probiotics in your diet then I would recommend eating more yogurt. Other good sources of probiotics include raw apple cider vinegar, sauerkraut, and pickles. No need to be "a goof" about this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2016, @06:14AM
Pickles from the supermarket aren't fermented, are they (I know you didn't say "from the supermarket")?
(Score: 2) by SubiculumHammer on Wednesday January 27 2016, @07:15PM
Here is the idea. Gut bacteria of a certain type like certain types of food. Other types like other types of food. Some break down sugars, others fiber, and so on. If you eat poorly (McDonalds) then you are selecting bacteria of certain types. But there is potentially a feed back loop. There are nerve receptors in the gut that signal reward centers in the brain, and gut bacteria produce a number of known neurotransmitters in their life-cycles, which may influence activity in the brain in reward centers.
A reasonable hypothesis then is that biotics in the gut would have a selective advantage if they could convince the host to eat foods that it prefers. If your diet tends to be laden with fats and sugars, then you are selecting a monoculture of fat and sugar digesting microbes, whom then produce neurotransmitters that activate reward centers for eating fats and sugars. However, those microbes that process vegetable fibers should have a similar interests in manipulating host eating behaviors to eat more vegetable fibers...but if you have a mcdonalds mnoculture of microbes the vegetable fiber microbes can not control the host effectively. On the other hand, if you have a balanced diet, or a balanced population of microbes, no single group can effectively manipulate your eating behaviors to their particular advantage.
I can't find the review paper right now that this cam from....but it is a fascinating hypothesis.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:40PM
I have noticed all of the yogurt manufactures seem to trade-mark their particular strain of bacteria. But as you say, there is no reason to believe a particular strain is batter than any other.
As a rule of thumb: trademarks can not describe the product. Otherwise competitors would be able to use it as a generic description.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SubiculumHammer on Wednesday January 27 2016, @06:56PM
Want a powerful probiotic for very cheap?
! jar with seal.
I head cabbage.
1/4 cup salt
Slice cabbage. Rub with salt until wilting. pack in jar, seal lid.
Leave on counter for 3-14 days.
Healthy. Delicious. More probiotics than you will get in a pill.
Pro-Tip. Needs to stay submerged under brine or can develop mold. If mold develops either remove that portion or toss all contents. KEEP IT UNDER THE BRINE :)
(Score: 2) by SubiculumHammer on Wednesday January 27 2016, @06:59PM
by the way, this is called making sauerkraut. You can buy it in stores, but if you do, only buy it if it isn't packed in vinegar and is in the refrigerated section.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=make+sauerkraut [duckduckgo.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2016, @07:09PM
Which also has some impact on efficacy statistics seeing as researchers usually test with the real thing but retail customers mostly get placebos.
Well I suspect many of those fish oil studies were with rancid oils. So no surprise the results are mixed. Can't be that healthy to consume rancid oils.
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep07928 [nature.com]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23863036 [nih.gov]
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/marketplace-fish-oil-omega-3-benefits-safety-1.3326587 [www.cbc.ca]
I've busted capsules from some sources and they stink. And capsules from other sources actually smell pretty nice (if you're into fresh fish anyway).