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“All disease begins in the gut.” – Hippocrates

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Probiotics Part 1

"What about Probiotics? Can I take them on the SCD?"

I have two initial thoughts for this post, and I welcome input. This issue is far from resolved...
1. The SCD does include probiotic suplementation, per se, in the yogurt. It's slow, and gentle. But here's the rub, you can't get a therapeutic dose of probiotics by eating yogurt (unless you want to measure your daily consumption in litres of yogurt, yuck!).

2. Therapeutic doses of probiotics (8-10+ Billion CFU) have been shown in credible studies to provide clinical relief of symptoms, and to help induce 'remission'. If the underlying premise of the SCD is to shift, or change the digestive flora to a more healthy balance, then wouldn't probiotic supplementation make sense with the SCD. The short answer is, yes...But. But there are no SCD friendly probiotics on the market, which means, if you are going to take them, you are necessarily going to have to ingest 'illegal' (for the SCD) substances, such as whey, garbanzo bean extract, milk, cellulose, etc. By far the most SCD-friendly way to take probiotics is to take a single species, Lactobacillus, in a dairy form. When you consume the bugs, they will in turn consume any lactose in the milk medium. I use Natren probioticsSo, what to do, what to do...


It's a cost benefit, deciding to take supplemental probiotics or not. If you take 10 Billion CFU/Day, you might ingest 5 grams of milk powder, or whey, for example. So the question becomes, Will those 5 grams of illegal substance hurt me more than the Probiotic will help me? Probiotics come in a medium. That is, the lab sends the little bacteria in a medium (such as potato powder) that the bacteria can use as food. Likeliness is that those bacteria, when activated in the gut will consume the majority of the powder medium on their way to health and freedom, but it's unclear to me how much of the ingested medium is consumed by the probiotic bacteria, or how much would be left to the 'bad' bacteria in the gut. That's the issue. The best way to take probiotics and stay SCD is to take SCD-legal species in a dairy medium.

Bottom Line: I take probiotics. In my mind, 5g of milk powder is nothing compared to the benefits of the bacteria. Only time will tell I guess.

More on Probiotics to come.

Onward to Health.

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