Probiotics labelled 'quite useless'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Also 25 seems like a very small sample.
Edit: it appears they also did a study on 46 people after taking antibiotics but that I still find to be a small sample size.
Last week I accidentally bought a bottle of water from seven eleven,which turned out to have probiotics added. Cost the same as regular water too...
Like how a lot of things became "gluten free" despite not containing gluten to begin with.
If in half the cases the newly introduced bacteria "lingered" before being expelled then that demonstrates some kind of traction. e.g. You might just need to combine that with a diet that favours the new bacteria you're trying to introduce.
i.e. Some sort of effect in 50% of the cases is better than I expected honestly
The main point of the article is that off the shelf probiotics don't do the wonders they are toted to. You would have to have probiotics tailored to the unique bacterial composition inside of your gut.
That's the main claim.
OTOH, they didn't test any off-the-shelf probiotic products in isolation, they tested their own custom probiotic mix.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31102-4?_re...
Their trial on 46 people, also in the journal Cell, showed it led to delays in the normal healthy bacteria re-establishing themselves.
Dr Elinav added: "Contrary to the current dogma that probiotics are harmless and benefit everyone, these results reveal a new potential adverse side effect of probiotic use with antibiotics that might even bring long-term consequences."
If you only read the first few paragraphs (where they discussed the effect of probiotics on healthy people) you might have missed this important piece of information.
This discovery is hardly surprising. Probiotics aren't regulated by the FDA as drugs, but rather as "food supplements", which basically means they have the same standard of regulation as regular food [1].
[1] To be sold as a drug (i.e. pharmaceutical) a product must undergo rigorous trials to show efficacy and find any unintended side effects. Clinical trials typically cost around $60-80 million, which is part of the reason drugs are so expensive.
About two weeks ago, two somewhat prominent doctors from Harvard Medical School got into an enormous disagreement over whether or not coconut oil was “healthy” or “killing you”. No one knows anything under the current system.
There is absolutely no way the public can reasonably believe yay or nay on any new thing about healthy living.
I've concluded that eating is good for your health.
[citation needed]
Jokes aside, you and GP are right; with this level of confusion, there's not much ground for trying to micromanage your diet.
My impression is that you have to be running a major caloric deficit to worry about protein sufficiency (barring an incredibly strange diet), so you may be able to simplify your dietary guidelines even further.
ETA: e.g. brown rice, russet potatoes, and whole wheat bread all have approx the same %DV of protein as they do calories.
I've seen lots of articles on this too.
You may also need to consume more salt and glucose so your body retains more of the water you're consuming. Due to osmotic pressure, your cells can't actually absorb water without the correct salt and glucose to help act as a transport.
128+ oz today is a ludicrously high consumption if you aren't working outside in the sun all day long or running a marathon or something.
The only thing that sucks, is getting up to pee every 30 to 60 minutes is kind of disruptive to coding in the zone :-)
Even if this stuff doesn't cause huge hurt, it definitely causes annoyance.
Everything else is purely of academic interest at the moment.
- Exercise regularly
- Eat a variety of fruits and veggies
- Don't overeat, especially junk food (we can argue over which foods are good or bad for you, but a lot of our diets consist of things such as potato chips that are obviously bad for you, at least in large quantities)
- Stay hydrated
- Don't be too stressed
It's only nigh useless if you are some "standard issue normal human with no alterations (aka health issues)" and want generic advice about what works for everyone all the time. Then it's pretty eye-roll worthy, for what I feel are kind of obvious reasons.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-a-harvard-professor-is-call...
You'll probably be mostly fine whether you eat coconut oil or not, as long as the quantities are not completely unreasonable.
> toxins
Can you define what you mean in particular? Because half of the nonsense in the dietary space is talk about "toxins" (and "chemicals").
Cassava, better known in the US as the source material for tapioca, contains chemicals that can easily decompose into poisonous HCN. If you crush the cassava, as when biting it raw, the decomposition enzyme mixes with the chemicals and produces poison. If you leach and ferment the root in water, the toxins are removed. If you grind the root into paste and let the HCN escape into the atmosphere, the toxins are removed. Without those toxins, the food is safe[r] to eat.
Food is made of a lot of different chemicals, and digestion encompasses a lot of different catalyzed chemical reactions. Some chemicals will slow down, speed up, prevent, or enable reactions between other chemicals.
A lot of that just gets oversimplified to "toxin" because the information has to be understandable to people who don't have a doctorate-level education in biochemistry. Because of that oversimplification, scammers can exploit the intentional vagueness and ambiguity to turn fear into money. In that case, the "toxins" are just bullshit designed to scare you into buying stuff. The easiest way to distinguish between fact and FUD is by asking the claimant to name the toxin. If they can say "cyanogenic glucosides produce cyanide poisons on maceration that interfere with the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood" it's probably a real thing. If they say "big agri-corporations spray them on all the food to keep us unhealthy, fat, and depressed" it's probably bullshit.
My experience in academia is that researchers rely heavily on controversy and drama to further their studies. It's part of the game they have to play to continue to receive funding or gain attention in the public eye.
The author of the paper seems like he's marketing a problem that he'll try to solve in the coming years, by building a company that offers bespoke probiotic solutions based on analysis of an individual customer's microbiome. Not a bad business model honestly, it's spreadshirt for your gut.
NB: I run a nutrition company and have an MS
For example, in what regards coconut oil, it's far from just two doctors from Harvard recently saying that coconut oil is bad for you. From the wikipedia page on the vegetable fat:
Due to its high levels of saturated fat, the World Health Organization, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, United States Food and Drug Administration, American Heart Association, American Dietetic Association, British National Health Service, British Nutrition Foundation, and Dietitians of Canada advise that coconut oil consumption should be limited or avoided.
The same goes for various allegedly "controversial" subjects like saturated fat and heart disease, sugar, salt, etc. You can typically find advice by multiple public health organisations and multiple studies reporting findings very similar to each other, stretching back decades. Just because then a new study comes out that bucks the trend, which is immediately widely reported in the popular news as a "groundbreaking new study", or because someone (often, not an expert) writes a book that tells "the truth" about the subject, is no reason to get confused.
In science always follows the consensus, as in business always follow the money.
Eat intelligently (I think we can agree that processed foods and sugar is less good than fresh veggies), and lower the stress.
Researcher says: "saturated fat is bad for you."
I ask: "Is laurin (tri-lauric acid homoglyceride) worse or better than stearin? When lipases release the fatty acids, is free lauric acid worse or better than free stearic acid? Do acetic acid and formic acid count as saturated fats in your analysis? Is there a significant metabolic difference between eating fats as mono-, di-, or triglycerides, or as non-esterified fatty acids? Does the comparison with unsaturated fats change if the fats in question are exposed to heat and oxygen prior to consumption?"
Chemically, those fats are all different. Metabolically, many of them are transformed via catalytic proteins into different chemicals, with certain steps being rate-limited, or resource-competitive with other steps.
But it appears as though no one really knows all that much about fat, other than you need to eat a certain quantity of fatty acids with one double bond three carbons from the terminal end (omega-3) because the human body cannot produce those by itself, and they are required for certain hormones and structures.
As far as I know, coconut oil, when compared to most other common vegetable oils, has a higher fraction of saturated fatty acids in it, but those fatty acids are also significantly shorter than the fatty acids typically found in animal fats and other vegetable oils. They are different fats, and a human body digests them differently. Do they follow different metabolic chains to achieve the same result, or do they produce different results? I don't know. No research I have seen has delved that deeply into those properties of dietary fats.
There are strong, consistent, and graded relationships between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol levels, and the mass occurrence of cardiovascular disease.[5] The relationships are accepted as causal.[24][25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...
there is probably an academic consensus that goes one way or the other, but our journalism has decayed enough that they don't even bother researching this.
Cause that's about as "scientific" our nutrition analysis is.
Aside not eating carbohydrates (that whole diabetes thing), I have no clue what's 'healthy' and what's not.
If there is controversy here, then people would likely err better by not buying extra health supplements like probiotics that may be causing harm.
Same with coconut oil. I go out of my way to use it because I heard it was healthy despite it infusing everything I cook with a cheap coconut taste. If there is controversy, then I would just use other oil products.
It's not like it's a debate on which way to spool your toilet roll where inaction is inconsequential.
Considering that probiotics are formally defined as having a beneficial effect when ingested, there is good reason for this to be "dogmatic".
The question then would be "what's a probiotic and what isn't?"
The parent post seemed to dismiss things as controversial, so I suggest that you can indeed take action on controversy: avoid buying those supplements.
It doesn't appear to have any mitigating health factors, as had been claimed (a lot, by a lot of people and a lot of the press), that would count against this. So it appears to be a really unhealthy fat, which should be used sparingly.
There is nothing new about healthy living.
Eat plants. Drink water. Sleep well.
Don't add salt to anything. Avoid sugar. Eat meat only in moderation.
Fiber from beans makes you poo good.
Coffee and alcohol in moderation is alright. Drinking to the point of visible external intoxication is not "in moderation".
Exercise, even if only a walk in the evening.
If you are overweight, eat fewer calories each day than your body needs to function. If you are underweight, eat more calories each day than your body needs to function.
None of that sells books, or drives eyeballs to the latest ad-infested "Doctors say x will kill ya!" article.
This is a good guideline for people who are on a sad diet and get plenty of sodium from processed foods and meats, but someone following the other guidelines you list and not salting anything is likely to be more at risk of low sodium than high, depending on their personal risk factors (HBP and genetic history).
(assuming the reason "avoid overly processed foods" isn't listed is that it goes without saying)
Almost exactly year ago I started adding salt to everything. Not only did the drowsiness go away, I haven't had single muscle cramp in the twelve months since.
It's important to use accepted science like Cochrane collab.
I guess the problem in nutrition is that it impacts everybody's daily decisions. It doesn't make much difference to me if string theory or super symmetry works but it makes a difference to know whether I should avoid coconut oil or not.
These products were developed commercially based on what they could make and not on any analysis of what a person's intestinal flora should be, nor any proof that the deliver system worked.
One of those cases where the patent model works is the development of prescription drugs. The possibility of monopoly profits leads pharma companies to develop and test drugs and run them through a regulatory gauntlet. Critics say it is expensive, but it does work in the sense that new drugs get invented and some of them really are a boon.
For something like fish oil you can do the research but it benefits everybody else who sells fish oil, which, oddly enough, lowers my blood triglycerides like a drug although having put up no real benefits other than that for years.
And people ask why so much hate towards marketing industry...
But, I don't feel that the second is a legitimate use of meta-analyses. Due to publication bias, the conclusions it draws are only useful if the efficacy of probiotics is a forgone conclusion.
Moreover: I have a huge question regarding their primary measure, specifically regarding their use of number from this study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14608267
Which show up as the 8th line of their risk-ratio calculation, but whose results have no relation to the values on that graph.
Moreover, this isn't peer reviewed, as far as I could see.
I would expect if they tried limiting their diet to foods compatible with the probiotics, they'd get more significant results, because the existing microbiome colonies would be stressed from lack of their usual junk/meat/fat and be weaker. (Almost all standard probiotics, other than dairy varieties [yogurt etc], are veg-carb-loving.)
Before refrigeration, there couldn't have been many probiotics consumed in isolated form rather than as fermented foods. Give the new bacteria some food to eat when they're trying to out-compete your existing (bad parts of your) gut microbiome. One of the most likely good foods for them to eat is what they've been cultured on.
It may not even be necessary to eat probiotics, if you already have some of the bacteria you want, you merely need to encourage it to out-compete bad microbiome bacterial strains. Eat food compatible with the good bacteria. But it's such a hassle to change diets, everyone wants a pill or a powder or one serving of probiotics they can add to their diet, keep everything else the same, and have the bad bacteria / imbalance miraculously disappear. Is it any surprise that's less likely to work?
Pain relievers don't seem to help much and I also don't want to live on a daily diet of them.
(Personal anecdote of why I am inclined to believe your friend's experience)
Basically I used to poop my pants weekly and couldn't work in an office.
Probiotics and keeping my eating to an 8 hour window (Intermittent Fasting) basically solved the issue for me.
However it makes sense to me that probiotics wouldn't do anything for someone who already has healthy gut bacteria.
Any office? Even the U.S. Patent Office?
Was that always like that?
EDIT: This might indeed have had something to do with 2007 change in EU's health regulations, as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actimel#Debates_surrounding_he....
At best, they've shown that blend to be quite useless as tested.
If the reason you are taking them is to cull dangerous bacteria such as H.pylori, you would first have to bring their numbers down to a point where the probiotics have a fighting chance. This is typically either done with anti-biotics, or a combination of supplements such as aged garlic, mastic gum, coconut oil, etc... to first kill things off. Then after taking the probiotics, the candida overgrowth has to be purged with garlic extract. Very few people will take the time to go through the right steps throughout the days/weeks required to balance things out. This lends itself to a wide variability in results.
As the article states - "The researchers said probiotics of the future would need tailoring to the needs of each individual."