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A fair yogurt warning: If you take lots of D3 supplement, yogurt is high in calcium and can be harmful.

I agree with ElliotB. Please make your own yogurt. Commercial ones contain sugar. Especially stay away from fruit flavored yogurts.

SERIOUSLY the sugar. i am a 'from scratch' type and when i saw the amount of sweetening that was involved in making just vanilla flavourec yogurt, i quit the sweetened stuff for good.

now it's plain yog only, in savoury contexts like soup, etc. if anything, flavoured with herbs/spices and maybe lemon juice. great dip alongside the hummus or to go with the imminent seasonal batches of delicious multi-green (see what i did there ;) ) spinakopita type creations

"Is it possible to culture probiotics to increase their numbers sort of like proofing yeast? For example, could one take a probiotic capsule, put the contents in some warm water with some amino acids (say from protein powder) and a little sugar and reasonably expect their numbers to increase?"

Actually, what you are suggesting pretty much already exists and has for a few thousand years. It is called Kefir (pronounced kafir).

Kefir is available both milk and water based. The good bacteria within it feeds off the sugars in the liquid and the end product/drink has virtually no sugar in it.

The milk based kefir has very little sugar to start with. I use milk ONLY from grass fed cows. No additional sugar is needed for milk kefir.

To make water kefir, you do add about 8 ounces per to about 60 ounces of water BUT the sugar magically disappears as the bacteria feeds off of it and the end result is a probiotic drink that tastes pretty good, is loaded with beneficial bacteria and is very low in sugar.

Timing with both varieties. I make about 32oz of milk kefir at a time and it is ready in about 24 hours. I make 64oz of water kefir at a time and from start to finish takes 4 days to complete (it is technically ready in two days but I flavor the water kefir with fruit and do a 2nd fermentation which adds two days to the process). In any case, if you time it right, the finished product can be sugar free or pretty close to sugar free. If you ferment the mix too long, alcohol starts to form.

If you want, you can naturally 'carbonate' the drink so it is as bubbly as any store bought soda. This is very, very easy to do. Also, there are many, many options when it comes to flavors. The drink is quite good!

I have been making and consuming kefir for about 2 -3 years. It takes me about 15 minutes every 2 days to prepare and is very easy to do. I drink well over 60 ounces of it a day, every day.


If you are interested in more information, you may find this link of interest:

http://www.thewalkingencyclopedia.com/k ... Milk_Kefir

There is a lot of useful information in the above article, one of the most interesting points to me is:

"A major characteristic of kefir is that the probiotics contained in kefir attach themselves to the colon, sweeps away all the harmful substances and colonizes the intestines."

NHE wrote:So I've tried a couple of rounds of David Perlmutter's 90 billion CFU probiotic. I took one capsule/day for the 30 day regimen. The effects were negligible. It occurred to me that even though this is a fairly high CFU count probiotic, that it is likely akin to the proverbial spit in a hurricane when compared to a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT). Has anyone pondered, or even tried perhaps, a much higher dose, e.g., splitting the bottle into 3 doses for 0.9 trillion CFUs/day or taking the entire bottle at once for 2.7 trillion CFUs? The higher dose might be better able to shift a stubborn gut microbiome. Thoughts and comments are welcome.

So the Dr. Formulated 90 billion CFU probiotic was on sale a while back at 32% off Vitacost's retail. I tried taking 4/day, i.e., 360 billion CFUs, for about a week. There was no noticeable effect neither on my digestion nor my MS. Oh well. Was the time period too short? Was the dose too low? Who knows. I'll volunteer to take a bottle, i.e., 2.7 trillion CFU, every day for 6 months. All I need is for someone to ship me 30 bottles every month.

Was the time period too short?


Yes, definitely!
It can take weeks of regular doses of probiotic for a somewhat healthy person to get the maximum benefits of taking it. And given our conditions, it could be more like months, maybe even years.


Was the dose too low?

Possibly. But better than much smaller doses. And certainly better than none.

Re-population of your gut to get it better in balance will likely take some time. Consider that there are likely 100 trillion bacteria in or around your body right now. So what you took was merely a drop in the bucket.

For maximum results you may want to consider taking a prebiotic.


ALSO, consider this: There are hundreds of different varieties of probiotic supplement around. In those hundreds, there are many different strains and combinations of good bacteria, along with different prebiotic fibers. Different brands have different mechanisms by which they can begin to work. And of course not only is the amount you take important but equally if not more important are the strains you take.

Read this recently which might be of interest here - on gut microbionta and how it's measured and how to change its diversity

https://honey-guide.com/

somewhat tangential but happened to be first result of a search on zinc cognitive

A CHARACTERIZATION OF NUTRITION STATUS AND GUT MICROBIOTA IN OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER (OCD) IN YOUTH (2018)
https://academic.oup.com/jcag/article/1 ... 51/4916826

abstract excerpt

"Zinc is physiologically essential and integral for optimal health; however, zinc deficiency is quite prevalent. Not only are youth (particularly females) more likely to have zinc deficiency risk factors, but they are also in a life stage where zinc deficiency is more problematic, based on its importance developmentally. Neural zinc levels have implications for neuroplasticity (a factor in cognitive flexibility, a feature of executive function that is impaired in OCD). Additionally, zinc supplementation has been demonstrated to improve mental health, and in animal models, zinc deficiency has been shown to alter the gut microbiota."

cervocuit wrote: ↑Fri Mar 23, 2018 1:48 am There is a probiotic called VSL#3 which has 450 billion bacteria. It has already been tested in EAE and MS with several sachets a day (total 3600 billion CFU/day)

http://n.neurology.org/content/86/16_Supplement/P5.320

Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that VSL#3 induces an anti-inflammatory immune cell profile that ameliorates EAE and may be applicable as a treatment for MS.

So it changes the immune profile in the good way but I doubt that there is any short term effect in humans.

For some reason, we can find it in France by the name of Vivomixx. I have tried It, and it tastes like salty concentrated yoghourt. Not surprising, when you know that one tablespoon of kefir contains 150 billions CFU.

But it’s expensive, I prefer water kefir and raw sauerkraut.

It's available in the US as Visbiome. It's expensive as well. A box of 30 packets is $95+Tx.

Long term use of probiotics reduce plasma Cytomegalovirus and Epstein Barr virus antibody titers:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27294502/

Reversal in fatigued athletes of a defect in interferon γ secretion after administration of Lactobacillus acidophilus:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2577537/
(Reduced concentration of IgA in the saliva and increased shedding of Epstein Barr virus have been associated with intense training in elite athletes!)

Adjustment to the gut microbiota may be a reasonable pathway by which to control disease pathogenesis and offer an important pathway for the treatment of multiple sclerosis and perhaps other autoimmune conditions:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9314007017