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I was taking several probiotic supplements but have been eating a lot of fermented foods and and drinking a lot of milk and water kefir (homemade) which both have hundreds of times the amount of good bacteria in them as compared to supplements so I have just stopped taking additional supplements.

I had tried numerous brands, there are so many available. The best value and formulation I found was from Dr. Mercola's site whose probiotic capsules had 70 Billion CFU and is Acid and Bile Resistant. It includes 10 strains of good bacteria. (Most probiotics typically have from 5 to 15 billion CFU and are not necessarily acid/bile resistant. Frankly, there are so many variables (time release or not, different strains and different number of strains, etc.), it is hard to know which one is best.

I take a probioti twice per day. One with breakfast and one dinner. I have tried many brands but I have found the following work very well for me. Neither of them are cheap! The cheaper ones have not worked at all.

Florastor
http://www.florastor.ca/

Jigsaw Health
http://www.jigsawhealth.com/search.php? ... =Probiotic

thisiswater wrote:So who among us takes a probiotic and what kind?

The two that I've tried are...

Primal Defense Ultra
http://www.vitacost.com/garden-of-life- ... n-capsules

Dr. Formulated Probiotics Once Daily
http://www.vitacost.com/garden-of-life- ... capsules-1

The second one is formulated by Dr. David Perlmutter who is a neurologist. I took it for two months. I noticed that I would get tired after taking it, so I switched to taking it at night.

How would you know if the probiotics work or dont work?

Hi,

I take this one - https://www.bioceuticals.com.au/product ... aBiotic-45

I agree, cheap ones are not much good.

How do you know if they work? It's a gradual change in how you feel and an improved stool for me. I no longer have bloat but I also avoid all dairy, grain and pulses.

A big difference some years ago came after I tried a week of lactoferrin, followed a weeks rest and then another dose. I did feel a bit paranoid when I took it but I'm the only person I know who reported that. It did turn my bowel from an overactive cement mixer into a normal series of movements within weeks.

Regards,

"Bioceuticals" indeed. We are all in unknown territory here. From what I saw, the FMT procedure puts the supposedly more healthy FM at the top of the large bowel to give it time to develop and grow before we evacuate it. If we try to put the bacteria in undigested, first of all our digestive systems are designed to keep living things out by killing them. That's why there has to be a large "dose" if they are to survive long enough to get to the bowels. These "bio-ceuticals" are playing with fire as far as I am concerned. Do we have any idea what they do? The vendor is not going to tell you if it's anything at all unpleasant or destructive.

It is a balance of about 1000 species. They must be acquired in the relative quantities that we get them naturally, from the correct relative quantities of foods, not the fast variety or the cuisine variety, but what you might find in the wild, uncooked, if you were used to having to find wild food. Typical modern humans aren't. If we were to try to provide this balance of foods to billions of people, modern agriculture would fail miserably. Millions would die.

If all goes very very well, with these so-called probiotics, you will end up with a slightly healthier colon, especially if you have been used to providing it with a desert of processed food, non-food, and single-nutrient foods, which will definitely keep it off balance, and in an unhealthy way, leading towards things like diabetes.

Probiotics is an unscientific marketing term which is designed to sound scientific by putting a new prefix, pro (another contribution from marketing) in place of the not-very-accurate-or-complete "anti" in antibiotics. But this is not anti-abortion and "pro-life" we are talking about. While these are both marketing terms as well, they do not have the cachet of science that words like "xxx-ceuticals" have.

"Biotics" as a suffix implies living things, i.e., bacteria. Rest assured however these bacteria are being provided by the voodoo that only with sufficient amounts of greed can you do so well. Stick with real food, and FMT if you can get it (preferably with an antibiotic "reset"), and eschew tinkering.

My nephew just had doctors and nurses poison his kidneys with overdoses of strong intravenous antibiotics, because of hospital-borne infection, which they are not equipped to deal with. A last-ditch attempt at fighting hospital-borne C.difficile is being tried. That's what all the FMT trials are about. The reason antibiotics are not working is Darwinian. The fittest, which survive the use of antibiotics, are the superbugs. In effect we are using sick people to culture them in human petri dishes. In vitro meets in-vivo. The best antidote for overuse of antibiotics may be FMT. It cannot however help you grow new kidneys.

I too had improvement in the bathroom area which to me was a good sign that they are working for me. Aside from a highly nutritious (but unpopular) high good fat diet, I am hoping that the addition of large quantities of probiotics (I am eating/drinking a lot of fermented foods) will be beneficial to my health over the short term and long run, and am already seeing benefits. Will it 'cure' MS? Who knows? There is always a chance. My hope is at a minimum that the progression is stopped or slowed. I will let you know the results in about 12 years!

1eye wrote:Probiotics is an unscientific marketing term which is designed to sound scientific by putting a new prefix, pro (another contribution from marketing) in place of the not-very-accurate-or-complete "anti" in antibiotics. But this is not anti-abortion and "pro-life" we are talking about. While these are both marketing terms as well, they do not have the cachet of science that words like "xxx-ceuticals" have.

It's likely that the "pro" prefix in the word probiotics comes from the word prokaryote.

Hi 1eye,

That's just a brand name. The company that started the brand had a much longer name and the new owners shortened it. It is a well known brand in Australia sold through chemists and some medical practioners. It is well manufactured and has the highest standard reviews from the National Association of Testing Authorities which is the body here that review good laboratory practice. If it was called "winky dink " I don't think it would have impacted on efficacy. Some brands are just on the shelf and are useless. You have to ask at the counter for this brand.

Regards,

The theory on the role of the gut microbiota on MS and HERV expression can be found on: http://www.thisisms.com/forum/general-d ... 27300.html

I have been adviced that any probiotics is good, and that the mcicrobiota should be as rich as possible.

I have taken Vivomixx 450 billion for a week or so. http://www.vivomixx.eu/eng/what-is-vivomixx.htm
It is a probiotics with 8 diffferent strains of live bacteria.

But I lost energy, got very tired, and then after a week or so I stopped.

I think it is not as simple as taking just a few probiotics and your MS is gone.
A diet with very high vegetable/fibre intake and antioxidants is probably more important to get the right gut balance.

"I think it is not as simple as taking just a few probiotics and your MS is gone."

Very true!


"A diet with very high vegetable/fibre intake and antioxidants is probably more important to get the right gut balance."

And how did you come to this conclusion?

ElliotB wrote: "I think it is not as simple as taking just a few probiotics and your MS is gone."

Very true!


"A diet with very high vegetable/fibre intake and antioxidants is probably more important to get the right gut balance."

And how did you come to this conclusion?

The experience of Terry Wahls

the fact that the effects of dietary intake are 1000x stronger than supplements

the fact that Prevotella is absent in our children but not in African children see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevotella

this recent patent http://www.patentdocs.org/2015/08/guest ... rends.html

and for the rest, call it intuition..

Thanks for your response. I am a firm believe in gut health. And while it appears that vegetable/fiber/antioxidant intake should perhaps be part of one's diet for overall gut health but I have not been able to find any evidence that these are more important than probiotics and fermented foods to get the right gut balance.

Can you elaborate, and pardon the pun but with specific evidence rather than generalities and your 'gut' feeling?

Dr. Mercola talks about probiotics and healthy gut bacteria.

http://probiotics.mercola.com/probiotic ... 1384775737

Because the human gut can hold only a limited amount of food and as the transit time of food through the human gut is protracted (averaging 62 h with low-fiber diets and 40 h with high-fiber diets), there is a clear upper threshold for the amount of such foods the human gut can process per day (14). In striking contrast to humans and all great apes, all extant Carnivora show a rapid turnover of ingesta. For example, a 370-kg polar bear takes ≈24 h to digest a seal carcass.

In the natural environment, energy-dense, highly digestible foods of any type are generally rare. When available, such foods often serve not so much to satisfy that day's energy demands but rather to provide fat stores for use as energy during times of low food availability or, in women, to help meet the extra energy demands of reproduction. Because humans have large brains, it is particularly important that they are adept at storing excess dietary energy as fat because ketones can serve as an alternative fuel for the brain. Recent technology has circumvented this natural energy barrier by processing or otherwise altering both plant and animal foods such that much more energy can be ingested per day (15, 24). In addition, most Westerners lead sedentary lifestyles, whereas the hunter-gatherer-agriculturalists I am familiar with work an average of ≥8 h/d, much of this work involving strenuous activities.

In conclusion, it is likely that no hunter-gatherer society, regardless of the proportion of macronutrients consumed, suffered from diseases of civilization. Most wild foods lack high amounts of energy and this feature, in combination with the slow transit of food particles through the human digestive tract, would have served as a natural check to obesity and certain other diseases of civilization. Yet today, all non-Western populations appear to develop diseases of civilization if they consume Western foods and have sedentary lifestyles (24). Given these facts, in combination with the strongly plant-based diet of human ancestors, it seems prudent for modern-day humans to remember their long evolutionary heritage as anthropoid primates and heed current recommendations to increase the number and variety of fresh fruit and vegetables in their diets rather than to increase their intakes of domesticated animal fat and protein.

“GUT MICROBIOME OF
THE HADZA HUNTER-GATHERERS,” BY STEPHANIE L.
SCHNORR ET AL., IN NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 5,
ARTICLE NO. 3654; APRIL 15, 2014

Compared to us these people have a large number of extra species of gut microbes (1.5X to 2X as many). The reason is entirely their diet. They just don't have a lot of access to meat, so the fiber contents of their diet is very high. While the rest of humanity has hardly any evidence of epigenetic changes due to diet, I'm sure these hunter-gatherers have a few more.

Co-incidentally, they don't get a lot of auto-immune problems.