56: Are Probiotics a Scam and Can They Help Crohn's or Colitis?

The probiotic industry is a dicey one and much of it is a scam - on top of that, many probiotics are going to be really bad for your gut when you have IBD.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Which probiotics are a scam or a waste of money
• Which ones are safe
• The best and worst probiotics
• How to get the most out of your probiotics

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Transcript

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The probiotic industry is worth more than a hundred billion dollars a year, but is it a scam? In this video, I'm going to be showing you why your probiotics are in fact not helping your gut, and you're going to learn why your probiotics are so bad or so good, and whether they can make your gut better or worse. You're going to learn which probiotics are a waste of money, which ones are the best for your gut, and of course, how you can get the most out of the probiotics you are taking. Intro Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and Colitis are reversible. Now, I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease, and I'm here to help you do it too, because inflammation always has a root cause. We just have to find it. This is the Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally podcast. Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips, and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below. Now, if you don't know me, my name is Josh Dech. I'm a Crohn's and Colitis specialist and a physician's consultant for complex gut diseases, and I do these videos every week so that you can learn that your gut can heal naturally, because contrary to what your doctor has probably told you, you can heal your gut. So, first things first, I want to talk about the elephant in the room, which is going to be probiotics. Are they a scam? Well, this is a really good question. There's a few things to address. Most of the research done on probiotics over the last 20, 30 years would say that the probiotics are going to die inside of your stomach, or most of the strains they've studied actually mean that they do in fact die in your stomach. So, unfortunately, that's supposed to be a skull and crossbones. I'm sorry for the way it looks. Anyways, so unfortunately, a lot of them will die before they get to where they need to go. Also, a lot of them do not colonize. They don't colonize inside of your gut, meaning when they get down there, you're not actually adding to your microbiome, but the results that you may be getting are from the postbiotics that the probiotics have already created. So, just to clarify, a probiotic, if you think of it like fish in a fish bowl, the probiotic is the living fish, okay? The prebiotics, you may have heard this term, inulin, and all these things. These prebiotics are fish food, and that fish or the living organism consumes those and produces a byproduct, which would be in the fish tank, fish poop, in our case, postbiotic. So, you have the prebiotic, the probiotic, and the postbiotic. Now, organisms work very much the same. These probiotics that are made in a lab, they're given food, they're given a substance to consume so they can grow and colonize, and they produce postbiotics, often in what's called short-chain fatty acids, SCFA for short. These are gonna be things like butyrate is a very, very common one that we'll see. Beneficial, it's the biggest food source for the colon cells. It's amazing for immune modulation, inflammation, the works. Certain probiotics inside of your gut also produce things like vitamins, right? Vitamin K, certain B vitamins can come from those probiotics. So, even though they might die inside of your stomach, they may not colonize, they've already produced all these wonderful byproducts, the fish poop, if you will, that your body can utilize for good. So, there are what's called transient benefits. As they move through your system and come out, they can have some positive effects by, you know, signaling your immune system and whatnot. The thing is, though, we have to really watch for this because the marketing is often better than the product. A lot of probiotic supplements out there, probiotic drinks, probiotic things are gonna market to you they're good for your gut, but the marketing is better than the quality of the strain or the quality of the product. That's what the $100 billion is. I'll bet you $90 billion of that is probably just garbage and a scam. So, you have to be very aware. There's certain drinks out there that have become popular recently, which might have, you know, 100 million CFUs. That's gonna be a term you'll see in probiotics. It stands for colony forming units. And these units, typically, what we wanna do is consume multiple billions, if not tens or hundreds of billions in most cases. You might be getting a fraction of this in the most commercial grade products you find at the grocery store, for example. Another thing that we like to see when it comes down to probiotics is going to be diversity. The more diversity of microbes, meaning the more variables you have in there is typically associated with better health. And we know that food-based probiotics give better diversity than, we'll say, supplemental or therapeutic grade probiotics. You might get a couple of strains in a bottle, or those ones that say 30, 40, 50 strains, just typically gonna be garbage. So, if you're consuming food-based probiotics, fermented foods, raw foods, you're gonna get a lot more diversity in your microbiome than the supplements. So, that's another thing to keep in mind. Also, commercial grade products. Like I said, you might get, we're talking CFUs, in a commercial grade. Most drinks, you might get a couple hundred million, all the way up to, even 50 billion if you're lucky. But if you're consuming food-based probiotics, especially if you ferment to make them at home by yourself, you could be getting anywhere from five billion, upwards of multiple hundreds of billions. And Dr. William Davis talks about this a lot when he's gone through his guts, his book, Super Gut. I actually have a copy on my shelf right here. He talks about this with his SIBO yogurt, how you can culture and ferment at home to get multiple hundreds of billions to get better diversity or better quantity of microbiome or probiotics in the microbiome as well. So, keep that in mind. Now, something else to look for. Probiotics, especially commercial grade stuff and these supplements, are gonna have little to no effect in healthy people with healthy guts. They're typically gonna be needed for intervention for those with an unhealthy gut. So, if you're taking it just for good measure and you don't have any known gut issues or other health issues, you might actually be tampering with a well-managed ecosystem unnecessarily. And so, you're actually putting at risk, you're risking causing problems rather inside of your gut. So, we wanna be very careful about that. And something else to look for, many supplements on the market, let's come back to our big scam word, Amazon has had a big issue with this lately. A lot of companies coming out of India, China, different places are selling a lot that are very lookalike labels. You might not notice a difference and some are so good, even the manufacturers can get them mixed up. So, all these supplements come into the Amazon warehouse, for example, Thorne and Now Foods. So, it's Now Foods, just like it sounds in Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E. Unfortunately, they're great quality products, they do a lot of third-party testing, but these two on Amazon have had a lot of issues because the fake brands look so much like the real thing. And so, what happens now is you get this fake brand that looks like the real thing that comes to the Amazon warehouse and it's in there in the same location as the real thing. Well, the warehouse workers don't know the difference. They all look the same and they can often get mixed up. So, you may be getting a fake product from a real seller. This is why it's so important if you're buying things like this, just shop on the direct website. Go to Thorne's website directly or Now Foods directly, order from the seller, skip the scams because you wanna be very careful about that. And a lot of these artificial fake brands as well don't often contain what they say they do on the label, but a lot of them also have contaminants. We've even seen some tests that have shown E. coli, which can be very, very dangerous if not deadly for some people. And the last thing to keep in mind when we're dealing with all of these things, if you do want probiotics, your terrain matters. The quality of your gut, the ecosystem you're adding these good guys into is gonna matter. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit. So, long and short, are they a scam? No, absolutely not. But can they be used to scam and are people being scammed? Yes. So, you have to be very specific, which is gonna answer our next question. Are they a waste of money? Yes or no. The answer is generally speaking, no. But for the general population, you're gonna be a lot lower on the totem pole of gut health supplements. If I'm looking at supplements for your gut, I might prioritize something, for example, like tributyrin way above something like a probiotic. And that's only because most people don't actually need probiotics. Where I specialize in Crohn's, colitis, and IBS, I use probiotics very sparingly. I will target them specifically. So, I'm targeting a specific condition for a specific response or a specific reason. I'm gonna get in there with things that I know work based on the studies, not these broad spectrum. And that's biggest mistake you're probably making right now, is you're going to just get a big, broad probiotic just because you're told it's good for your health without realizing what you're taking, why you're taking it, or the data behind it. And it ends up becoming expensive urine or, in this case, expensive poop. And so, I'm targeting Crohn's, colitis, IBS, infections, certain inflammatory processes with a specific strain or formulation, not a waste of money. For the general population, taking them, oh, I'd say rather arbitrarily, big waste of money. Which also brings up the next question. We kind of talked about scams and money, but are they most importantly, I don't know why I drew my E like that, are they safe? Generally speaking, probiotics are safe, especially under supervised care when you're targeting specific type of conditions. And if you're getting these commercial grade products like drinks, like poppy recently became popular, Pepsi bought them out for something like a billion dollars. The probiotic count in most of these things are going to be generally so low, it's probably not an issue, it's just a tasty pop probably sweetened with erythritol or whatever they use. But if you have conditions like SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, if you have histamine issues like MCAS, we call it our mass cell activation, you're someone who gets really phlegmy when you're eating certain foods, you get irritable, bloating, rashes, hives, eczema, allergies, you want to be very careful. Because a lot of probiotics, not only can they contain histamines, they can also liberate histamines from your body. If you've got mold exposure, these probiotics can often worsen your condition. So for you, they may not be safe. Let's talk about the best and the worst types of probiotics. Because this is an important conversation. We talked about some that are a scam, so we know the best ones are the ones that are not a scam, obviously. But the conversation you want to have is what about strains? So we're going to talk best versus worst. There are some that I generally use when I'm talking to my clients dealing with bowel diseases or any kind of condition, because they're really good regulators for inflammation, for the immune system, they're good for controlling the gut lining, for regulating overgrowth of things like candida, which again, it's natural in your ecosystem, but it loves an inflamed environment, it can overgrow and become very toxic. And so in these cases, I'll use very specific strains. There's one called Saccharomyces boulardii. I've been using it for a decade, I still can't spell Saccharomyces boulardii, but we'll call it SacB for short. There are other probiotics. The most common ones you'll see are Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium. Just to put these up on the board, that's Lactobacillus and then Bifidobacterium. Just spelt exactly like they sound. But this is an umbrella. Lacto and Bifido are huge umbrellas with hundreds and thousands of different strains and genus and underneath these species. So if we're looking at them specifically, I'm more inclined to use certain Lactobacillus ones like what's called Rhamnosus or I might use something like Lactobacillus plantarum. Again, there are like LP299V and different specifics of the plantarum strains. Some of them are even patented, but they can produce very beneficial effects inside of a human body. And so we want to use them very specifically. Bifidobacterium is another one. I might use a lot something. Again, depends like Bifido infantis or others like that. But there is a spore-based probiotic and these ones, don't get the mix up with Bifido, it's called Bacillus. Now there are different Bacillus strains, but a spore. If you think about taking these probiotics, these are like the living fish, okay, the fish in the fishbowl analogy. The spores is like a handful of fish eggs where you're not just gonna have one fish that goes in, but you're gonna have many, many fish flourishing and breeding and growing and producing more and more of them. And so sometimes we'll often use these. Now more isn't always better, but certain strains like Bacillus subtilis and coagulans. So Bacillus subtilis and coagulans have been very thoroughly tested for immune issues, inflammatory issues, all kinds. And these have been tested through scientific studies, analysis, research, microbiome samples, immune panels, the work. So we know they work for what they work for. But there's something very interesting you may not have heard of yet, and that's because it's relatively new to the Western world. But the truth is, Europe and Asia, like France and different parts of Asia, have been using these for probably 30, 40 years. And these are called parabiotics. Now parabiotics are actually dead strains, which might not make much sense. But think about the original idea behind a vaccination, whatever your thoughts are on those. But the idea was take a dead virus, put it in your system, your body will recognize and say, hey, we can do something with this or we're going to build the fences without the actual damage being done. Now a parabiotic is the dead thing, but they kill it just enough, they raise the temperature just enough to kill it off so it's dead, but it's not exploded, it's not denatured, it's not completely unbound towards unrecognizable like in the process of things like pasteurization, which will heat to over 400 degrees. So in the cases of parabiotics, they're heat killed dead strains, they help regulate the immune system, and all those cell wall components that make up the probiotic are still intact. And they interact with your immune receptors, specifically some we call TL or toll-like receptors, it's TLR. They interact with these and can send signals like a radio signal and have all kinds of great benefits inside of your body. And so these are typically very safe for those sensitive populations, those with Crohn's, colitis, SIBO, autoimmune conditions, histamine issues, mold, even children who might be sick. Typically these parabiotics respond very, very well in their system, can trigger a lot of the benefits without the risk of fermentation, colonization, or other issues we don't necessarily want if we're not testing. So parabiotics are something to keep an eye on. Now spores, another conversation we had briefly, again, that's about the bacillus strains, bacillus coagulans, bacillus subtilis, those bacillus strains are an example of a spore. Now spores, again, they have a shell on them like a coating, they survive the stomach acid, and they've been clinically tested in many, many instances through benefits in post-antibiotic exposure to help sort that out. But again, the risk is over colonization, so we have to go slow. But spores, even though they can be really beneficial, have not been well tested in very sensitive populations, and that data is still sort of coming out right now. Which brings us to another point. These are some of the best, but what are the worst? Okay, I know what to buy, I know what to look out for, I know where to shop. But if I'm buying them and I'm looking at the label, how do I know it's going to be a waste of money? So there's a couple of things to look for when we're dealing with the worst versions. Number one, the top of the list here is going to be anything you'll find typically at the grocery store, especially the cheap ones, and we're just going to call them generic. Real probiotics take real testing, clinical and lab testing, to make sure that they're quality production. Generic brands that you'll find with 30, 50 strains or more, things bought on Amazon. My favorite is the ones that say refrigerate after opening, but they came in like a hot box that was sitting in the sun. Make that make sense to me. There's all kinds of things we've got to watch for. If things that are warmed up, cooled down, anything that's not stored properly, an unverified generic brand, again, if it doesn't have any lab testing, any reference, the website's pretty sketchy or hard to get to or non-existent, they're probably going to be crap. If they are cheap and you're not spending a lot of money on them, they're probably crap. A lot of companies will charge more just because they can, but the reality is a lot of companies charge more because they have to. Because they put millions of dollars into lab testing and clinical testing to make sure they're giving you a quality product that has what it says on the label, that's going to survive the shelf or survive the fridge, that they're shipped to you properly. All these things cost more money, and that's why they end up costing more money to you. And again, if you're taking something that is going to be non-specific, generally speaking, it's going to be the worst. It's going to be a waste of money and you might just be making very expensive poop. So the final thing I want to answer for you here is how do you get the most out of your probiotics? Because if you're taking them and you're spending the money on them, you don't want it to go to waste. You want to get as the best bang for your buck you can of every supplement, every product you're taking. So the first thing we have to look at is going to be terrain. And I can explain this best by using fecal transplants. It's exactly what it sounds like if you're not familiar. They actually take poop from one human being and give it to another through a couple different things. There are retention enemas, exactly what it sounds like, like face down, ass up, let it sit. There are what Stephen Gundry actually calls crapsules, where they take it, dehydrate it, put it through a centrifuge, put them in a capsule, you swallow it. And then the other one is colonoscopy, where they go in, clean out, you've got gastroenterologists and anesthesiologists in your operating room, and they actually plant stool in there for you. And that replaces the microbiome. But here's the thing. If you were to take a healthy tree from a nursery and plant it into soil that's full of salt and dogs are peeing it all the time, and there's frequently, you know, fires in the area, and the air quality is really poor, and it doesn't get watered, do you think that tree is going to survive? I mean, of course not. And so we're dealing with the terrain. That's the soil you're transplanting these probiotics in, either through a fecal transplant, through probiotic supplementation, through food ingestion. If you have mold in your home, if you're chronically stressed, if you're ingesting chemicals, pesticides, toxins all the time, if you're drinking alcohol, eating junk food, and sugar, and refined foods, we're going to have some problems. Now, for those of you who might have Crohn's or colitis or other bowel diseases, sometimes when we go to transplant, say a fecal transplant, or actually using probiotics, they're going to take better under biologics or steroids to manage those inflammatory responses so that you're not transplanting them into a house that's already on fire. So keep that in mind. Terrain matters. The next thing we have to look at, of course, like we just briefly talked about, is going to be lifestyle. Your diet needs to match the desired outcome. So if you're eating fast food, you're going to get fast garbage results, and you're going to get fast bowel movements, typically like diarrhea, right? So watch for that. If you are consuming something that is not benefiting your gut, and you're putting it into the same place you're trying to plant these new trees, you're going to have a problem. So you have to watch for that. We know that certain foods can promote better gut microbiome diversity, right? Raw foods, fermented foods, the works. So there's a lot to have around this conversation. I don't advocate for either carnivore, or I actually don't advocate for vegan at all, but plant diets or animal diets, I think both are great based on how you do and how you feel, and how you feel will also directly impact that terrain, therefore the gut. Now, if you're making homemade probiotics, it'll help you get the most out of it. The reason we go with homemade is you can ferment and insert a culture as long as you want, and you can actually get a lot more bang for the buck, and you can continue to replicate that. As long as you give them food, and you keep the environment safe, the jar, like the mother dough for a sourdough, or the scoby for kombucha, you can continue to culture and colonize these as long as you want to live forever, as long as their environment is safe. And then the last recommendation is going to be being specific. I recommend if you're working with a professional, ask them before you go arbitrarily taking a bunch of probiotics, dropping them down the hatch, and not realizing what you're doing or what you might be harming. So on that note, here's what you need to know. Probiotics, are they good? They can be. Are they a waste of money? They can be. Are they safe? Usually, but you've got to look out for what you're putting in, what you're paying for, etc. If you guys have been dealing with this for a long time, look, you can get help with your gut, right? Your gut doesn't have to be this random, arbitrary thing that seems like an enigma nobody can fix. If you're looking for help with your gut, Crohn's, colitis, IBS, you've got a condition, diverticulitis, you're inflamed. Your doctor says, well, your only hope is going to be medication. It's going to be steroids. It's going to be immunosuppressive drugs, surgery, and there's no hope for you. I'm telling you right now, there's a 99.9% chance that is not true. We've had people come in to see us on the brink of having their bowel removed who have been able to get their bowels healed. Colonoscopies back it up and prove it. So much can be done, but you just got to lead them to the right thing. So here's what you're going to do. There's a very easy way to get help from me and my team. All you got to do is check the links below and you can schedule a call, send me an email, or just dive into all the free resources. Guys, I have so much out there for you that's available. I've got a podcast called Diversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally, specific to those diseases. My podcast, ReversABLE, Reverse Able, A-B-L-E. We have some of the best of the best guests in the world. We do shorts on there, quick tips, how to fix conditions. It's all available. Those resources are there. But again, all that information can be found in my social media, so make sure you check it out. Thanks so much for being here. You guys know what to do. If you check the link in my bio, there is so much free stuff out there on gut health. We're up to almost 200 episodes at this time now on the ReversABLE podcast, and you can check that out. We got guys like Dave Asprey, Stephen Gundry, William Lee, Lisa Bilyeu, some of the top of the top in the world. You can check them out on the ReversABLE podcast as well. If you're here for Crohn's and Colitis, check out the show, Reversing Crohn's and Colitis. Naturally, we get 52 talks, I think, guys, of today, all published. They're absolutely free. Thanks so much for coming. We'll see you next time. One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of, I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years. And if this, for the first time, is really starting to click, and it's starting to make sense, you're going, wait a minute, this might be reversible. I think there's more that I can do. This condition came out of nowhere. It happened to me out of the blue. I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and suddenly I wasn't? And you're telling me there's no cause. If you're understanding, finally, that there is a cause, that something is driving this, I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below. Send me an email. Ask a question. See if a program is the right fit for you. Because I promise you, this doesn't have to be a lifelong sentence. You're not doomed to this. And IBD can be reversed.