61–70 of 95 posts
Wasn't there recently a discussion of a risk of methanol formation from an ethanol producing strain? I sure hope that none of your strains produce ethanol.
Slightly different point but many bacteria in us right now also make lipopolysaccharide (LPS). If it were purified and injected iv, the LPS in me could probably kill me 1000 x over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Ethanol kills competing bacteria and is only produced in microscopic quantities. Methanol is produced by a lot of bacteria, almost every human produces it within their body.
Isn't methanol a strong poison? I do not believe that any probiotic or native strains produce it. Chemically the problem with ethanol is that it's too close to methanol.
”Small amounts of methanol are present in normal, healthy human individuals. One study found a mean of 4.5 ppm in the exhaled breath of test subjects.[19] The mean endogenous methanol in humans of 0.45 g/d may be metabolized from pectin found in fruit; one kilogram of apple produces up to 1.4 g of pectin (0.6 g of methanol.)[20]”
”Ingestion of as little as 3.16 grams of methanol can cause irreversible optic nerve damage, and the oral LD50 for humans is estimated to be 56.2 grams.[66]”
19: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0967-3334/27/7/00...
20: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.1997...
66: https://aoemj.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.1186/s40557-017-01...
PSA: If a probiotic is on the shelf, not in a cooler, it's probably not worth buying. The best companies certify the count of organisms at time of manufacture , but no counts are guaranteed at the shelf. Probiotics are living organisms and ought to be refrigerated for max lifespan. You can get refrigerated probiotic supps at a place like Whole Foods. Source: I used to work in the industry.
I would love to see this same analysis with a gut probiotic! I am never convinced if I'm wasting my money, which strains are best, should I do refrigerated or shelf-stable, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also frankly, doctor =/= expert on probiotics. None of their training really addresses that and while they might be more qualified to read research than random layman I would not in general ascribe authority to what a random practitioner has to say about probiotics. Frankly, the research on probiotics is still very much in its infancy and a LOT remains to be figured out.
Absolutely, if you have access to domain specific experts or researchers than that should trump whatever your more generalized expert will say. Also right to highlight that just because there exist specialist in something does not mean we have the full or correct understanding yet, it's just your best place to find information regarding it unless you want to go join the field. Great points!
I want this for nasal microbiome. I think modern living is wreaking havoc on our upper respiratory track. We need to find a way to regenerate or improve nasal cavity microbiome.
>However, there is some light evidence that the variation I see is not just intra-day variation. Specifically, there are several species that stay consistent in frequency across all samples: e.g., Neisseria subflava, Streptococcus viridans, Streptococcus oralis. Disagree. You can not make that claim without sequencing your mouth's microbiome in the absence of probiotics for a month as well (and, really, many more tha…
This happens a lot when people discover that you can order your own bloodwork. Reddit supplement and biohacking forums gets a lot of posts from people sharing bloodwork from two different dates and concluding that the changes are entirely due to their supplement regimen. When you’re only getting a couple tests it’s not easy to see that even day to day variations in these tests can be very large. Even timing of tests during the day, how you slept, or what you ate can have a lot of impact on many tests.
Doing some basic controlling without taking the supplement is important. Doing double-blind tests on yourself also isn’t that hard if you put some effort in. There have been some surprising results from people doing controlled tests on themselves and discovering that the supplements that looked promising on paper were either doing nothing or were trending toward being negative. Gwern’s experiments with magnesium supplementation which were generally flat with hints of trending toward being negative are a good example. That experiment was a good reality check during the era when the popular narrative that we were all severely magnesium deficient and the solution was high doses of magnesium for everyone.