Prebiotics: Feeding Your Gut Bacteria & Microbiome

Prebiotics: What Are They?

Having the right gut microbes is a key part to maintaining optimum health. Recent understanding is that prebiotics and probiotics are able to improve your health, through complex body-microbe interactions.

Not many people know that you are able to influence your intestinal microbes through prebiotics, probiotics, lifestyle and dietary changes.

Probiotics are foods or supplements that deliver beneficial microbes to the gut to support the existing gut micro-biotic environment. Through microbial competition they also supress the growth of harmful gut bacteria and believe it or not, some microbes can even destroy others.

Microbes can actually evolve really quickly and have adapted to live quite easily in our intestines over time. Many microbes don’t survive the journey through stomach though, after all that is why the stomach has developed like that.

To put a complex body dynamic in simple terms, the acidic stomach environment is selecting for only the best survivors, but also the most symbiotic bacteria. Bacteria that enhance aspects of the immune system, especially out in the open environment, provides an evolutionary advantage.

Or for cows, having the best B12 producing fermenting-bacteria puts you at an incredible evolutionary advantage.

It is actually quite astounding to think that some of these microbes can survive the acidic PH of the stomach. However, that is also how we get some illnesses, such as stomach flu.

These sorts of illnesses used to ravage human civilizations, but in modern times they are not as prevalent as a cause of death.

Most beneficial bacteria are found in the colon, but they can be found throughout the gastrointestinal tract.

Prebiotics: Microbial Energy Sources

Prebiotics provide accessible nutrients for your gut microbes, that help to encourage and restore the microbial diversity of your intestines. Some prebiotics can be unique feedstuffs for specific beneficial gut microbes.

Most people just assume that prebiotics consist of dietary fibres, like salad. However there’s a more diverse list than just that.

Bacteria have a slightly different method to accessing energy than we do and certain bacteria or microorganisms are specialised to breakdown certain foods.

Some example dietary prebiotics are foods such as oats, high in specific long-chain sugars, bananas, asparagus, spinach and leek.

Microbes are a lot simpler than people. They take a simple input molecule and convert to various outputs. They also evolve far quicker in harsh environments like the gut as a result.

Some of them like certain types of simple sugars, some like more complex sugars and some of them are specific to milk or meats.

Prebiotics

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Prebiotic foods and supplements contain complex-sugar oligosaccharides, or dietary fibres, not fully digested in the gut that encourage gut-microbe growth

Example prebiotic foods include bananas, oats and spinach, containing highly complex sugars

Researched health benefits include, positive effects on immune function, obesity and stress or inflammatory responses. All linked to major health problems

Modern lifestyles and agricultural practices are detrimental to beneficial microbe growth in our food

Prebiotics are generally considered safe and could support defence from infection

Prebiotics: Fructo-Oligosaccharides, Complex Sugars & Fibre

Humans are omnivores so digest many different foods. To encourage the best microbial balance in the gut, one should look to eat a variation of complex sugars and proteins.

There aren’t many food molecules that meet the entire official definition of a prebiotic like the dietary fibres, inulin or fruit sugar-type oligosaccharides.

Fructo-oligosaccharides are basically long-chain sugars, built from one of the basic sugar starting molecules called fructose. Inulin is a fructan or fructose-type long sugar molecule. These sugars were seen to boost Bifidobacteria numbers in the gut.

While certain foods encourage bacterial growth, officially a probiotic is resistant to full digestion, absorption and must be fermentable by gut bacteria. The fermentation process is just a simple breakdown of human undigested input molecules, like complex sugars.

Examples of these sugars include milk-sugar chains, called galacto-oligosaccharides, containing lactose or milk sugar molecules. These are a delicacy for probiotic Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli strains.

Human respiration or energy production centres around glucose. Our diets naturally contain high levels of glucose-rich starches. Gut friendly Bifidobacteria have evolved to breakdown excess starch that doesn’t get digested.

Other intestinal bacteria prefer to break down plant cells or cellulose sugars. These beta-glucose sugars, like those you find in spinach or leafy greens, encourage different microbial complexes in the digestive tract.

Microbial Fatty Acids or SCFAs

Microbes ferment host indigestible fibres, like cellulose for example, producing the volatile fatty acids that enter our blood stream to communicate with our brain and as an energy source.

These fatty acids boost the cell growth gene mTOR which is key to muscle, blood brain barrier and explosive cell growth.

SCFAs or short chain fatty acids include butyric acid, lactic acid and propionic acid. They all have benefits to body and gastrointestinal health, being produced by a wide spectrum of bacteria.

Microbe gut fermentation products are mildly acidic, providing the protective effects against pathogenic bacteria. This encourages bacteria or microorganisms that thrive in that environment.

Microbes are very sensitive. Even minor gut Ph changes can cause lots of micro-biotic changes as seen in cows. We will discuss gut-Ph effects on microbes in a little more detail later on.

Prebiotics: Why Take Prebiotics?

With our modern inflammatory fast food and diet styles, many people find themselves in danger is missing some key gut microbes.

The symbiotic microbes in your gut are playing many different roles when it comes to your health. We all need healthy levels of gut microbes.

They support healthy digestion, immune system functioning and have a massive impact on your brain health.

Prebiotics Vs Probiotics: Key Facts

Previously we talked about some major probiotic supplements, what they can do for your gut health and the health benefits that this brings.

You can find a link to that particular article here to learn more about the differences between probiotics vs prebiotics. Or simply compare the prebiotic vs probiotic fact sheets in this article.

While we have already covered probiotics and what they do for your health and microbiome in a little bit of detail.

Next we will cover some of the major and direct benefits of prebiotics.

Not just to your overall gut microbiome and microbes, but also how they add a benefit to your overall health.

Probiotics

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Probiotics deliver positive microbes to the gut, maintaining gut health and microbiota

Positive gut microbes influence immunity, inflammation and body stress signalling

Probiotic microorganisms increase access to amino acids and key energy nutrients like vitamin B12

Microorganisms in the gut influence your brain health and could influence weight loss

Top probiotic foods include: spinach, yoghurt and kefir

Prebiotics: Gut-Brain Axis – Microbes on the Brain

Microbes in the intestines are constantly sending signals to and from the bloodstream, some of these are going into the brain through the blood brain barrier.

The blood brain barrier is very important in itself, as it forms a protective shield for your entire brain activity and resulting physical functioning. The last thing you want is a toxin or pseudohormone overload to the brain or nerve cells.

Microbes in your intestines are sending signals through volatile fatty acids that are able to reduce stress hormone signalling and reduce inflammation. In many cases of immune disorders from our modern diets, there is an association with changes in intestinal bacteria. These include the short chain fatty acid producing bacteria mentioned.

Certain prebiotics are known to increase the cell counts of these bacteria in the gut microbiome-environment, with wider health benefits.

Microbial-Neurotransmitter Signalling

Some long-chain fructose sugars, present in fruits, can trigger an increase of certain Bifidobacterium numbers. They also aid normal glucose metabolism, through reducing certain bad gut bacteria. These sorts of sugars have been shown to reduce stress inducing corticosteroid releases, linked to the glucose breakdown from these bad bacteria.

Stressed animals, with a compromised and weakened gut microbiota, were more stressed than those with diverse gut microbiota.

Interestingly, stress can work in the converse direction. Higher levels of stress seem to have negative impacts on gut bacteria diversity, affecting specific types of bacteria too. This can produce a negative feedback loop, where good bacteria get reduced. This is apparent in many modern-day diseases like cardiovascular disease.

The body is able to also encourage growth of certain bacteria using chemicals like noradrenalin, in a cross talking interaction with the nervous system. This response is classed as quite a strong bacterial sensing reaction, causing growth towards the intestinal linings.

A strain of Lactobacillus rhamnosus, one dairy-sugar digesting probiotic bacteria found in many different supplements, is capable of altering some brain neurotransmitter levels including glutamate.

Glutamate is an excitatory messenger involved in learning and memory formation.

Tryptophan and Gut Microbiota

The earliest studies in microbe-hormone studies detected microbes can affect animal host responses through the gut. They are able to produce and interact with certain neurotransmitters too, such as tryptophan and GABA. GABA is an ancient hormone that plays a role in thyroid function and signalling.

Bacterial use of tryptophan in the gut has a wide range of effects, including protection against gut inflammation.

Certain gut bacteria can respond to catecholamines too, like adrenaline and dopamine, used in nerve cells. An interesting development is how specific bacteria can trigger vagal nerve responses and behaviours search as anxiety.

This would suggest certain bacteria are able to contribute to remotely regulating the stress response.

Prebiotics: Effects on Obesity

Certain signalling chemicals are sent through digestive tract cells to let the body know it has had enough to eat, triggering a response of satisfaction. These brain signals can be regulated by certain gut bacteria.

Taking prebiotics and certain probiotics helped to regulate weight in obese patients. Excess weight is correlated with cardiovascular disease risk. Prebiotics have been shown to lower CVD risk through inflammation reduction.

In our article on our top five probiotic supplements, we mentioned moving gut bacteria from skinny to obese animals and how this affected weight loss. It does seem that encouraging a positive microbial environment leads to weight reduction.

Prebiotics: Microbes & The Immune Response

As if the harsh stomach environment was bad enough, these microbes have to go through one are the largest concentrations of immune cells in the entire body. This is almost like a border zone, where you need to display a certain pass of good meaning and intent to enter.

This communication takes place through physical interaction and chemical exchanges. Because the intestinal layer is so thin for food absorption, the body needs to make sure it is protected.

Effects on Infection-Caused Inflammation

Specific cells in the immune system can release some pretty harmful chemicals to trigger infection responses. If there are too many bad bacteria present in the gut, they can trigger some negative health consequences. Including gut inflammation and stress.

These responses can go through to the brain, with the entire body needing an immune responses to harmful invasive pathogenic or disease-causing bacteria. Such responses require fire-fighting antioxidants to run around to fix all the damage.

There also consequences to diseases, such as allergies and depression, that are linked to microbial-immune system interactions. Certain skin allergies were reduced with prebiotic use, such as atopic dermatitis, improving collagen production in the dermal cells.

The volatile fatty acids made by certain gut bacteria cause spikes in leptin level signals from fat cells, signalling when you are full. They seem to also reduce overall inflammation responses, including helping the development of intestinal mucosa for healthy food passage.

A prevalent gut bacterium in the gut was shown to regulate some aspects of gut immune function and intestinal inflammatory response through histamine production.

Prebiotics: Effects of Gut-Ph On Infection & Microbes

Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli in particular have been studied for their abilities to supress disease, mainly through lactic acid production from their metabolic fermentations.

Microbe gut fermentation products are mildly acidic, providing the protective effects against pathogenic bacteria, encouraging bacteria or microorganisms that thrive in that environment. Microbes are very sensitive and even minor gut PH changes can cause lots of micro-biotic changes as seen in cows.

Grass eating cows digest cellulose using specific bacteria in their various stomach tanks. Cows need an alkaline gut Ph for their gut bacteria and can die from lactic acid build ups from the wrong bacteria.

Symptoms can progress in hours, the gas and bloating symptoms are very painful for the animal. This can happen in humans in rare occasions. However, a mildly acid Ph is preferable for most of the beneficial bacteria we have for our digestion. Though some do enjoy the very slightly more alkaline Ph of the ileum area of the small intestine.  

In Crohn’s disease and IBS, specific gut bacteria such as Bifidobacteria were greatly reduced. With some studies suggesting decreased levels of these key bacteria cause certain aggravations of symptoms.

The by-products of another short chain fatty acid, propionic acid, assist with immune activity. They target specific white blood cell activities.

Peptidoglycans, or amino-complex sugars, are produced through fermentation and stimulate immune specific responses.

Prebiotics: Antibiotic Use

People often talk about antibiotics as a modern medicinal saviour. They can even trigger quick growth in animals too that is quite frankly unheard of with other techniques.

Organic Farming Systems

The downside to using antibiotics is not just antibiotic resistance, but also the destruction of the gut microbiota and the gut microcosm.

Antibiotic use was banned in Europe many years ago as a feed additive. With naturally bred species like the double muscle Belgian Blue beef cow, shown in the above image, it seems Europe doesn’t need those substances to be competitive for livestock and breeding.

These sorts of practices are banned if not heavily restricted in organic livestock production and are a massive part of modern intensive agriculture. The same can be said for pesticides that are also detrimental to soil and other microbial growth.

However, antibiotics are still used in animal livestock feeds across the world.

Prebiotics and illnesses

If you are on antibiotics, it is worth asking your medical practitioner if you should also be taking a probiotic or prebiotic too. The gut microcosm of antibiotic treated animals have been studied and there was evidence to suggest massive reductions in certain neurones and neurotransmitters in the gut. This can also include medications such as anti-depressants.

Not only do prebiotics formulations encourage the growth of beneficial microorganisms, they also have been shown to reduce the numbers of harmful bacteria too. Through mechanisms mentioned earlier, like lactic acid production, actually promoting wellness.

Mannose is a sugar that as a prebiotic was seen to reduce colonisation of salmonella a food-borne illness. Prebiotic inulin, or large fructose sugar molecules, encourage a heightened antibody response to viral pathogens.

Prebiotics: Safety Concerns

Prebiotics are generally considered to be safe to take without severe side effects.

Some side effects could include bloating, cramping, flatulence and diarrhoea. While the prevalence of these need to be studied, they have been seen in some individuals.

Powerful prebiotics will confer gut changes. Naturally, gut changes will have some minor side effects.

Conclusion

Overall, microbes play a massive part in our health and wellbeing.

The full spectrum of the role that microbes play is not fully appreciated. Our modern diets and newer farming methods have left this ancient symbiosis behind, with what looks to be like escalating consequences.

There are various gut microbes and we have only just started understanding some of the more important ones, such as Bifidobacterium and Lactobacilli.

These sorts of microbes produce short chain fatty acids in the gut, that have a lot of potential downstream health effects.

Without proper gut microbes, certain nerves don’t develop at all and you could be more susceptible to physical and chemical stress responses. Gut microbes are able to influence aspects of your immunity and brain functioning remotely.

SCFAs, like lactic acid, can guard against escalating pathogenic bacterial infection of the bowels, ensuring mutual survival and growth.

While highly selected for in the bowels, there are many different probiotics and prebiotics that can encourage healthy gut microbiota. This includes certain foods, like oats or bananas, or fermented foods.

These prebiotic foods contain complex-sugars and fibres that don’t get completely digested in the bowel, encouraging the growth of existing microbes in the gut.

For more interesting articles, navigate to the main articles below.

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Top 5 Probiotics: Top Gut Health Supplements Reviewed

Probiotic Microbes and Gut Health

Probiotics can influence various aspects of your health and well-being. Research scientists have only just started to identify the role that your gut bacteria play in your health.

Interest seemed to have started through experiments that investigated why obesity levels were increasing globally.

The agricultural situation globally is one of mass production including: mass fertiliser, herbicide, pesticide and antibiotic use. These factors are detrimental to natural soil microorganisms and your own internal gut microbiome.

Many scientists hypothesised a link between these two factors and we now know that they are definitely linked.

There was a lot of evidence to show the foods you eat influence your gut bacteria, your weight and vice versa.

For example, a fatty diet produces a completely different range of gut bacteria to a low fat diet.

One standout microbial study found that switching gut bacteria from one set of fatter animals to skinny ones transformed their body structures.

They stripped the pre-existing gut bacteria with pharmaceutical antibiotics and replaced the gut bacteria with those from lean animals. Basically, the fat animals went skinny. How cool is that! It was all because of their gut bacteria influencing their body weight.

Where weight loss effects weren’t seen, other beneficial health effects have been reported specifically with supplementation.

From these sorts of experiments, naturally, there was gathering interest in the healthy lifestyle community. People wanted to know how probiotics can maintain and encourage good health through introducing healthy gut bacteria, harnessing the power of nature.

There’s always been an underlying emphasis in the wellness community to embrace nature as much as possible.

A central idea of natural wellness is to harness nature for improving one’s wellbeing. Let’s delve into probiotics themselves a bit more to see how they could be of benefit to you.

Probiotics

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Probiotics deliver positive microbes to the gut, maintaining gut health and microbiota

Positive gut microbes influence immunity, inflammation and body stress signalling

Probiotic microorganisms increase access to amino acids and key energy nutrients like vitamin B12

Microorganisms in the gut influence your brain health and could influence weight loss

Top probiotic foods include: spinach, yoghurt and kefir

What Are Probiotics?

Probiotics are supplements or foods that you eat which could help to encourage or maintain the growth of helpful gut bacteria vs harmful gut bacteria. By harmful micro-organisms we mean those that will have an overall negative impact on your wellbeing, whether that is physical or mental.

Probiotics are separate to prebiotics, in that prebiotics are the feedstuff for your gut microbes restoring diversity. Whereas probiotics are delivering the actual microorganisms to the gut.

There are many examples of traditional probiotic foods such as green leafy vegetables, yoghurt or kefir being standout examples containing positive micro-organisms.

Foods like spinach are abundant in naturally occurring microorganisms and kefir is one of the best probiotic foods there is. Kefir is specifically made to harness naturally occurring milk digesting bacteria.

While not only increasing access to nutrients such as phosphorus and calcium, kefir acts as a probiotic to load the gut with positive microorganisms too. We personally recommend most people eat kefir once a week to aid with overall wellness.

Kefir has been studied in relation to cancer prevention for its anti-inflammatory effects on the gut and GI tract. They say what goes around comes back around, in relation to stress signalling molecules and cancer, this is certainly the case with the GI tract.

To see a little more on stress and inflammation reduction check out our article here, we also have an article on cortisol reduction too.

Why Take a Probiotic?

Weight Loss and Nutrition

Probiotics could make a real impact to the digestion and absorption of critical nutrients from your food. These include Vitamin B12, a vitamin that only certain microbes can make and essential amino acids that are needed for muscle growth.

Your gut microbes are thought to positively influence efficiency of energy production, inflammation of the gut as well as obesity.

Gut microbes were seen to dramatically improve neural growth and overall brain wellness in animals, which could be linked to increases in certain nutrient levels.

It is known that certain microbial gut yeasts dramatically increase body weight. Inversely, probiotics are thought to positively influence these factors by adding extra good bacteria to the gut. Some probiotics have promoted weight loss in humans.

Brain Health and Probiotics

The microbiota in probiotic foods and supplements produce unique signature, fatty acids that are thought to communicate indirectly with the brain and receptors. While not exactly clear as to how it all functions in the body, it is an exciting thought.

Healthy gut microbes are thought to be a major influencing factor on mental health too because of the spectrum of molecules they interact with and produce. Gut bacteria have been shown to influence many hormone and basic cell signalling pathways, through corticosteroid and tryptophan induced changes, that can influence enormous aspects of your health.

If you want to read a bit more about tryptophan, serotonin and melatonin and their health effects, you can do so here.

Some studies suggest that probiotic microbes might play a role in a child’s development pre-pregnancy and development of the blood brain barrier too.

Gut Wellbeing, health and Immunity

Maintaining positive relationships with other organisms, such as these symbiotic gut microbe relationships, has good outcomes for survival and of course wellbeing too.

It is easy to see how we built such strong relationships with certain microbes. Gut microbes and probiotics might also be able to play a positive role in immune system functioning and allergy responses. Some studies have shown probiotics reduce intestinal infections.

The science suggests that we once produced vitamin C, similar to how cholesterol is made in the liver and delegated this to plants. This is because they were able to do that process with far less energetic cost.

Human relationships with cattle, their unique microbes and overall vitamin B12 production may have developed similarly to this over time. Microbes evolve minor changes a lot quicker and with far less detrimental effect than we can. It is really easy to see how these small-scale symbiotic relationships exploded with humans.

Top 5 Probiotics

Top probiotic manufacturers make all sorts of considerations when preparing a probiotic supplement. They work out the right capsule or tablet coating design to pass through the acidic stomach, which works to naturally kill pathogens.

They also work out the best strains of probiotic bacteria to use too. These considerations will clearly have the biggest impacts on your gut health.

We’ll now cover the Top 5 probiotics and how they can assist with your wellbeing.

Optibac Every Day: 90 Capsules

One of the world leading probiotic and prebiotic innovators is Optibac. They host a wide range of probiotic products, with the most popular being their Optibac probiotics everyday capsules probiotic formula.

Containing elite level strains of probiotics they are industry leading. Their research suggested that the best strains to use were different types of Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium and Lactococcus. These are naturally occurring bacterial strains that have been heavily researched for their probiotic benefits.

This product boasts 5 billion live cultures per serving or CFU. The CFU at the end is a unit of measurement. The CFU count just means how many individual cells of bacteria or yeasts there are in a probiotic supplement culture.

Seeing as there are live cultures in probiotic products, as best practice, we would recommend your products are kept refrigerated.

This Optibac product is award winning and has been heavily researched by the team at Optibac. The product contains a small number of proprietary prebiotic fibres that gut microbes are encouraged to feed from.

You can take one or two daily as recommended.

This product is marketed as gluten free, yeast free and vegetarian. There are no added sugars and the capsules themselves are made from just about next to most basic industry standard there is.

We really like this product. Optibac seems to have thought about the design in the depth that a probiotic needs to be. There is a potential for people to be wasting their money without effective product design and Optibac set that standard quite high.

Udo’s Choice Super 8-Hi-Potency Probiotic

Udo’s Choice is one of the original probiotic brands. They’ve also got multiple products including one digestive enzymes product that we have reviewed previously.

Udo’s Choice Super 8 Hi-Potency Probiotic is also an award-winning product and gives Optibac a massive run for its money. Udo’s Choice won a remedies digestion award in 2018 and a taste for life essentials award in 2018.

This product boasts 42 billion CFU on manufacture, mostly being cutting edge probiotic strains of Lactobacilli. The CFU count has also been independently tested. This product was developed with your gut in mind, specifically to reduce yeasts and harmful bacteria in the GI tract.

There are a total of 8 live human native-strains of bacteria in the product, selected for high gut colonization. They emphasize strains such as Bifidobacteria that make those short chain fatty acids we mentioned earlier. Aswell as the other Lactobacilli strains, that encourage normal energy production and digestion.

Again, it is nice to know one has put their money in good hands. There isn’t a guideline amount, just that one to two capsules a day are recommended.

This product one hundred percent needs to be refrigerated and lasts about one month in total. The product costs about 25 dollars for a 30 capsule bottle.

One again as this is a capsule based product, there are minimal added coatings. We would say this also pretty much close to the basic type of capsule, with minimal additional ingredients.

Ancient Nutrition SBO Probiotics Gut Restore

Ancient Nutrition are established and upcomers in the supplements market. One of their best-selling probiotic products, Ancient Nutrition’s SBO probiotics Gut Restore is available at close to 45 dollars a bottle including 30 capsules.

This seems quite expensive relative to the other products reviewed. This probiotics formulation contains 25 billion live cultures or CFU. Not as many as Udo’s Choice but very competitive as a product, especially with Optibac.

Just by the way the product looks, this has been designed with a lot of thought for the consumer. It is immediately apparent that the team at Ancient Nutrition have thought about the entire GI tract system, including the stomach.

They’ve used resilient probiotic strains that can make it through the harsh stomach environment. The strains in the product have been selected because of their natural occurrence and potential to support the immune system, with clinical evidence.

You get some other digestive and immune boosting compounds in this product including a blend of mushrooms, zinc and magnesium. There are also some whole foods and superfoods included such as Licorice root and Marshmallow root.

This is where the additional cost comes into play, this is not just a probiotic but a gut formulation and the product has that feeling to it.

The capsule is the very least possible you can use in the industry, with a basic non-harmful cellulose wrapping. 2 capsules are recommended on an empty stomach. This is to reduce the heat-food induced breakdown of probiotic strains that are sensitive to temperature.

Bronson Probiotic 50 Billion CFU

Bronson Probiotic 50 Billion CFU is made by another supplement industry titan. This product has been formulated to support healthy digestion and the immune system too.

The active cultures within Bronson Probiotic have a 50 billion CFU count, one of the highest reviewed here, with 16 live strains. This is an incredible blend of probiotics and comes priced in at about 30 dollars a bottle.

This is a really good value for money product and commands the hallmark mindset and traits of a made in America product. They also suggest two servings and you could probably get away with one serving here.

The capsule is basic, probably about a middle range capsule for quality in this review. On its own website, the Bronson Probiotics formulation has an outstanding review record. We are not surprised as this is a commendable probiotic formula. CFU count has a massive impact on how many strains make it to the intestinal tract.

The product contains freeze-dried strains, improving bacterial cell survival, this means it does not need to be refrigerated. However, we still would recommend fridge storage to maintain a cold and constant environment.

The product is vegetarian friendly and gives you about a month’s supply of probiotics. Bronson probiotic 50 billion CFU is self-confessed as soy and gluten free. The product is regularly independently tested as required by international GMP standards. Which is very important but highly expensive.

Bronson probiotic 50 billion CFU contains a couple of fruit extracts, such as pineapple that can help with digestion and inulin prebiotic fibres to assist the growth of microbes. These will highly likely be independently assessed extracts from naturally growing fruits.

We really like this product and rate this one very highly on our list here.

Culturelle Probiotics: Bloating & Gas Defense

Culturelle Probiotics products are one of the most bought in the States. 25 dollars will get you 30 capsules of Culturelle® Bloating & Gas Defense, which has been designed specifically to do that.

Containing large amount of a specific Lactobacillus rhamnosus strain, this product is made to address gastrointestinal bloating and to make the digestive system run a little smoother. The product contains 5 billion CFU of that strain.

There are also additional digestive enzymes, as a proprietary blend and ginger root in the capsule to aid healthy digestion.

They suggest one capsule, which is vegetarian, is plenty with this product. The packaging mentions it does not need refrigeration, although we would suggest doing so.

This Culturelle Probiotic product is free from sugar and artificial dyes and is also allergy friendly. However, we have noticed that the product contains titanium dioxide and maltodextrin as additional fillers which are on the lower end of capsule quality.

It is worth checking the packaging for any changes if you buy or have bought this product.

This is a strongly rated and popular product on their website. However, it is not as strong as Udo’s Choice or Ancient Nutrition’s probiotic formulas as a probiotic.

Conclusion

This is a really close call, with all of the products here showing elite level knowledge of probiotic formulation.

First place goes to Bronson’s Probiotic product. Bronson Probiotic 50 Billion CFU has everything you would want from a leading probiotic supplement. Boasting massive cell counts and strain diversity.

The capsule is also of a good standard too, with proprietary technologies, GMP testing and prebiotics too. We think this is the best probiotic supplement on the list here.

Next is a choice between Ancient Nutrition and Udo’s Choice. They are pretty much indistinguishable as products, however Ancient Nutrition offer slightly more in the product with a unique design too. This is really quite a close call between these three products.

Udo’s choice is a staple probiotic, one of the originals and ranks higher than Optibac who we rate in fourth place. Both are very similar products but Udo’s choice wins out overall.

In last we have Culturelle. While this seems like a popular brand, when we look at the product it is not very impressive to us.

For more interesting articles, navigate to the main articles page below.

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