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Probiotics - the inside scoop
 
Johnny Vegas Views: 366
Published: 20 y
 

Probiotics - the inside scoop


Found an excellent article on probiotics written by an insider.

He lists reasons why many/most probiotics don't work:


1. Not all species of Lactobacillus are probiotics. Worse, not all members of any one species are probiotic. It's easy to think of a bacterial species (let's use Lactobacillus acidophilus) and assume that all bacteria with that name are exactly the same. Wrong! Try an analogy - Think of an animal species, lets say "dog". Now, think of a dog. What are you thinking of? A spaniel? A poodle? A rottweiler? A chihuahua? They're all very different, but they are all the same species. The same thing applies to bacteria (although of course the differences are a bit more subtle). I've seen this kind of thinking lead to big mistakes, even in the scientific literature. One scientist finds a Lactobacillus acidophilus with probiotic abilities (it can, say, help pigs to resist E. coli infections). Another scientist decides to test the first scientist's work, so he gets another Lactobacillus acidophilus and feeds it to animals. It does nothing, so the second scientist concludes that the first scientist's work was a load of crap.

What happened? Well, the first scientist isolated a whole range of Lactobacillus species and tested them in the lab to see if they could inhibit the growth of the E. coli that's causing problems in the pigs. Some did. So, he takes the best culture and feeds it to pigs, and gets a result. The second scientist just isolates a bacterium with the same name from milk, doesn't bother testing it, and feeds it to his animals. It's a randomly selected bacterium, chances are it's not going to work (about 10% of Lactobacillus isolates show promise as probiotics, which means that 90% of isolates are no use. See Hillman and Fox in refereed publications). So, here's part of the explanation for the extreme variation in the reported effects of probiotics. Some studies are just wrong.

2. Bacterial cultures adapt to the medium in which they are grown. So, when you take Lactobacillus from the gut, where it was in constant contact with other bacteria and competing with those bacteria for food, and grow it in the lab on its own, you change the population. Since the Lactobacillus population you have now contains no other bacteria, those members of that population which were good at competing with other species no longer have an advantage. The cells that are good at competing with their own species will do better. As you continue the culture, inoculating fresh tubes, you are effectively applying a selective pressure to adapt to life as a single culture in a laboratory medium. Because there is no longer any advantage in competing with other species, the population loses this ability. There are examples in the scientific literature where a probiotic was shown to be effective, then retested 10 years or more later and found to be useless. Here's another part of the variation. The effective probiotics lose their ability over time. There is a way to make them keep their ability in the lab, but our marketing people think it's patentable so I can't tell you what it is yet. Watch this space.



JV.
 

 
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