Summer is a time we can all use a little relief from the heat. But for probiotic products, staying cool isn’t a matter of comfort—it’s a matter of life or death. Probiotics are colonies of living organisms (measured in colony-forming units, or CFUs) that must reach your gut alive in order to confer their many…
If you search online for “probiotics” you’re likely to find a wealth of information on the health benefits that these “good bacteria” confer when taken as a dietary supplement. They maintain balance in our gut flora, promote healthy gut motility, and support a healthy immune response, to name a few. But to achieve any of…
We often tend to think of our body’s many systems—digestive, immune, circulatory, neurologic—like workstations on an assembly line, each contributing separately to our overall health and function. But, in fact, these systems are far more interconnected with multiple channels of communication, feedback, and gatekeeping. It is this delicate web that helps us maintain both health…
In the second part of this 2-part series on The Perilous Journey of Probiotics From the Manufacturer to Your Gut, we learn about the perilous journey of our probiotic from our mouth to our gut. With digestive enzymes, stomach acid and the risk of other challenges, this is a major-league trek to arrive safely in…
In the first of this two part series, we focus on an issue that is taboo in the probiotic market – the perplexing challenge of delivering live probiotic cultures to health food stores after stifling hot, cross-country journeys in delivery trucks. (In Part 2, we will learn about the second part of the harrowing journey…