Should I Be Taking Spore-Based Probiotics?

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Should I be taking Spore Based Probiotics? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Wendy from Facebook asks, even with probiotics, after way too many antibiotics, it doesn't seem like it's working. Is the trick a spore biotic? Hey, it's J.J. and I've got Dr. Michael Ruscio with me to answer this question. He's my favorite guy to talk about probiotics. Now you may know him from his awesome podcast, Dr. Wuxia Radio or is the author of the best selling book Healthy Gut Healthy. You. You know, I just happen to know he's also an adventure junkie who's a musician in his spare time with a secret dream to paraglide. We'll be right back to answer this question. Hey JJ Virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me, travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things and suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface. On your laptop or on your phone. Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could be a real goal. This time. Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin.

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Great question. So what do you do if you're using probiotics and feeling like you're not getting any traction? This is a common question and it's interesting in the clinic to see many patients coming in who have already used probiotics and when we give them a little bit of clarity and direction on how to use them, there have been some cases where literally all of their symptoms are gone in, let's say, two months or so. So understanding how to use probiotics is crucially important. What we don't want to do is just go to the health food store and just randomly grab probiotics off the aisle or just go from blog to blog trying these willy nilly. There's a overarching structure that we can implement to help us more effectively execute a probiotic protocol and I've termed this the 3:4 balance protocol, meaning we use three different types of probiotics to lead to optimum balance in the gut microbiota. The analogy you can picture here say you have a stool that you want to sit on. If you had a one legged stool you could sit on it, but it's wobbly. If you have a three legged stool that is most conducive to balance on the stool. This is the same analogy that holds or seems to hold in the gut. Three different probiotics seem to be more conducive to achieving balance in the gut and the gut ecosystem. So a spore based probiotic is one. But what will happen in some fair number of cases is they don't have the other two legs of the stool. So the one leg of the stool, let's say you're using kind of a traditional probiotic, which is fine, a Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium blend that gives you a leg of support, but you fall over after a little while because you don't have the counterbalancing legs of support. The other two legs outside of the traditional type, which is a Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium blend is a Saccharomyces boulardii probiotic. It's actually a healthy fungus. So that's your second leg and then the third is a soil based. And using all three together again can be the difference between successful balancing of the gut microbiota or always feeling kind of like you're floundering. So certainly something that you want to effectively execute is, yes, this probiotic protocol, the three for balance system helps you achieve that. The other thing to consider is the quality of your probiotic, and I always cringe a little bit when I make a comment about quality because supplement companies are notorious for using quality as an excuse to jack up the price. However, when you look at some of the independent analyses that have been done on probiotics on the market, it's pretty alarming. Some studies have found that less than 50% of the probiotics on the market even meet their label claims. Meaning if it says 50 billion, you're getting 5 billion, or they're telling you it's Bifidobacterium infantis and it's some different organisms because they haven't done genetic testing to quality assure that what's in the probiotic is actually what you're getting, or what they're saying is in it is actually what you're getting. So that's another factor that's important. It doesn't mean you need to buy the most expensive, but it does mean if you're looking at something that's way cheaper than all the others, then you really may want to rethink if corners are being cut there. And this is why I'm so proud of the probiotics that we've put together, because we haven't cut those corners. And it takes a lot of research to make sure you're doing things right. But a good formula can get you very far. A good formula used in the three for balance system can get you really far. It's not a guarantee, but that is an unbelievably good place to start.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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