6 Reasons Probiotics Can Cause a Bad Reaction

It's Dr. A. Question, you say, I took probiotics and I got sick. What's up? I thought they were good for me. Well, I'm Dr. A and I answer your questions on this channel. I base that on a long, long time practicing as a physician, also doing medical research, mostly human research with cancer patients, and also doing a lot of writing and teaching. So Let's get into this question of, I took probiotics and I got sick. What's up with that? Well, here's the thing. So a probiotic— you've heard of antibiotics, right? Antibiotic kills things, usually bacteria. If you broaden the term out, it can mean killing other stuff, but usually we think of like penicillin killing bacteria. A probiotic is actually an outside organism normally that you take That is something that either is supposed to beef up the organisms growing and living in your GI tract, or is actually one of the good flora, the good organisms that live in our GI tract that we want to enhance or increase in the GI tract. So what are ways that you could take a probiotic and you might feel sick afterwards? Now, the first thing you want to think about is you can take a lot of things. Like, let's say you have an infection and we give you an antibiotic because you're going to die from the infection, you might get all kinds of sick feelings from taking that antibiotic. You can go back and look at some of my old videos on treatment reactions and I'll tell you why. So the idea of feeling sick when you take a treatment doesn't always mean that the treatment was bad. Now, it might mean that, but it doesn't always mean that. It might mean there's just a lot of things going on. So first thing is, just because you have a reaction to a treatment, it probably means you need some guidance. It doesn't mean it was a bad treatment 100%. Next thing though is that probiotics by their nature are either bringing in your human flora, the bacteria that we're trying to grow in our GI tract that's healthy, and give you the same strains of bacteria that you ought to have in your GI tract. That's one kind of probiotic. Another kind is probiotics that are things that help out the ecology of your GI tract Uh, but they sort of go in, they help to reshuffle things around, but they don't really stay in large amounts in your digestive tract. They're not part of your human microflora. So when we say human microflora, that just means people bugs that live in the GI tract, right? We have trillions of them. They help us digest and absorb, they help our GI immunity, they do all sorts of good stuff. You want the human ones to be growing. Now, How do they get off? They get off because maybe we take antibiotics and kill them. Maybe we have another set of diseases that knock them down. Any number of things can knock off our human microflora. And then what we can get is like indigestion. We can get digestive system inflammatory activity. We can have the wrong bacteria and viruses and other things grow. And then we get a super infection with things in our gut that, you know, yeast and parasites and other stuff that shouldn't be there, all sorts of bad things can happen. So people often take supplemental probiotics to beef that up. Now, a lot of people know about, you know, probiotics in, say, yogurt and other cultured foods, which is true for many cultured foods. They have, you know, they have organisms in them that are live or almost live and Can be helpful with the digestive system. So a lot of people, you know, get theirs that way. There's also a way which we'll do a separate video about called prebiotics. So probiotics are the actual bugs. Prebiotics are foods that just set up your chemistry in your gut so that the good flora grow like they're supposed to. This is a lot of things like fermented foods, you know, sauerkraut's really good there, but But also things like bananas and cabbage and onions, and if you just look prebiotic, you'll find a zillion foods that you can eat. Now, that's a really great thing for prevention because it helps your body reestablish its own biome, but probiotics sometimes are given to you by your physician or you just take them on your own or whatever, as maybe, you know, you have some yeast overgrowth, a yeast infection, Maybe you've taken some antibiotics, you'd like to get the good bugs back in there, or maybe like this person who wrote in, you just enjoy, you know, trying new things and you want to try some probiotics and you got sick. Well, here's the bottom line. A couple of things happen when you have this negative reaction. One is if it's a human microflora, so you'll see strains that say HMF, human microflora strains, those are people Uh, flora. Those are the same bugs that live in you. You can take those. If you got sick from that, a lot of times what it is is there's so many bad ones down there that the good ones and the bad ones kind of have this sort of war that goes on and you can get some, uh, indigestion and gas and maybe some cramping and other stuff. Now, normally speaking, there's a couple ways that your healthcare provider might go with that information. They may say, back off, don't take that for a while, let's do some prebiotics, etc., and then we'll start the probiotics at a lower dose. Because probiotics come in different doses, and sometimes lower is better for some folks. Second option, if that happens, is you may have a bacterial overgrowth called SIBO, S-I-B-O, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and a common feature of SIBO is that you take probiotics and you feel indigestion, gas, bloating, other problems. That's real common too. Another reason for this can be that, yeah, there's actually things you need to kill down there. So maybe you have a need to do some GI infectious testing and find out what's there and kill it. Now, another category of things is sometimes there are probiotics that are much broader than the human microbiome, and these might be things like spore-based probiotics and other things, and a lot of their goal inside of you is to get in there and not only maybe help you re-establish the right bacteria that should be there, but also to sort of put other human tolerance, so okay with people, agents, bugs in there that kind of beat up on the bad microbiome, the bad bugs, etc., and push them over to the side so that your natural flora can regrow. But a lot of times these spore-based or soil-based probiotics, other stuff like that, if you have a real sensitive system, they can be very good therapeutically, but they can be real hard on you and you can get some side effects from them. Now there's another reason that people get side effects from taking probiotics, and that is because They actually get what we call a die-off reaction. And this is also in some of my older videos about treatment reactions. You look at those, this fits into one of those categories where the good bugs you put in— take the probiotic, you literally go and the good bugs go, and in the war with the bad bugs, they beat the bad bugs up and they die off. When bad bugs die off, sometimes get a release of chemistry in your digestive system that can make you feel very sick. It can also make you feel sick globally. You can get joint pain, achiness, tiredness, flushing, fevers, other stuff like that. You literally get all that from things dying off. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why you might take a probiotic and it may make you feel sick, quote unquote. What you need to remember is it's It normally doesn't mean that that probiotic is bad. You know, it might, but normally what it means is one of these other downstream things. Have I killed off something by taking this probiotic that just doesn't like it and it's going to poison me as it dies, like a die-off reaction? Uh-huh. Have I taken a probiotic that's just got too many good bugs in me and now there's too much war and I've got gas and bloating and cramping and stuff, or have I taken something that my body just doesn't like? It's not friendly with my body for other reasons. Sometimes probiotics are grown or put into a medium, the base, that might be something that you are sensitive to. So for example, you know, people who have dairy allergies or sensitivity have to be very careful with probiotics that they're not in base of some sort of dairy product, because then you're just sort of taking an allergen along with a good thing. There's a lot of reasons for it. Biggest thing that I would say as far as advice is, if you get a bad reaction from something, because you don't know from that bad reaction, is the product bad, or was it the wrong dose, or, or whatever else going on, number one, I would not take any more of it. Uh, but number two, I would get some outside advice from a healthcare provider who knows about using probiotics and digestive treatments. And that could be any number of healthcare-type providers, but they tend to be people who've had some extra training in integrative and natural therapies. So you get people who are integrative medical doctors, et cetera. You've got integrative nurse practitioners or PAs, a lot of chiropractic physicians who do this, a lot of acupuncturists do it. Naturopathic physicians are very well trained to do this sort of thing. So find somebody who knows how these things work and can help you out with that. Because most of the time when I see someone report that bad reactions to probiotics, it's what lies beneath that is the problem. Well, I'm Dr. Anderson here answering your questions. I want to thank you guys, all of the new subscribers. Thank you so much for that support. Please do like, share, hit the notification bell, subscribe, all those good things. And I will be back with you with more of these answering your questions.