Dr. A explains when probiotics actually help: during antibiotics, chemotherapy, or chronic illness. They work only if the microbes are alive and properly stored. Watch for gas or bloating, but stop if you get serious inflammatory symptoms, which might signal SIBO or SIFO.
Today I want to talk about probiotics. Why would we use them? Get into that just really quickly. Get tons of questions about probiotics. Hi, I'm Dr. A. This is my YouTube channel. I've been seeing patients with cancer and chronic illness for decades, and I've been teaching and researching in the integrative medical community for 30 years now. So I use this channel to answer questions, get into stuff that people are curious about in my area of expertise. So the first thing is, Why would we use probiotics? Well, a lot of times we have stressors in our body, might take some antibiotics and it kills our good flora, might be chronically ill, might have cancer, may have had other therapies mess up the probiotic microbiome in the body. So one way to reestablish that beyond eating, which we've talked about in other videos, we'll probably link at the end, is to take a probiotic. So I remember back in the 1970s, colleague friend had started a lab. I won't use the name of the lab, but it became very very famous for developing probiotics to feed to animals. Now, a lot of times these sort of trends are seen in veterinary medicine before we use them in people. And this whole idea of— they never knew what antibiotics were. This whole idea of using probiotics to help the immune resistance of the cattle and all of those stuff that was being fed was, you know, sort of a new idea. Now, that was in the '70s. A lot's changed since then. But one of the things that they saw, and they first, you know, were more likely to publish it in the veterinary journals, was if we're giving the cows or the sheep or whatever antibiotics, ruining their microbiome, let's add some probiotics to their feed. Go into this giant lab production area, and it had this smell because they're giant car-sized production area for each type of probiotic that they were growing. So, these are generally bacteria. Now, they're a little different sometimes for cows and sheep than they are for people, but same idea. Well, it wasn't much longer after that in the '80s and '90s that probiotics supplementation for humans got a lot of press. So probiotics are effective because they can go in and they can do some things that we don't want to get too far into, like all the stuff they do. But one of the things that you need to keep in mind is you want the probiotic alive when you take it. And a good company will tell you, you know, how long this stuff will last. Generally, it's better if it's in the refrigerator. If you have to store them a long time, it's better in the freezer actually, because they are living, living probiotics, microbes. But the other thing is that a lot of probiotics actually do non-bacterial things or adjacent bacterial things when they get in your gut. So what that means is that they can get down there and they can actually have communication either with other microbiome agents or your gut cells that is really not the primary function of that bacteria that you're using. So you might say, well, what, what do humans mostly use? We have, you know, trillions of good bacteria and even some viruses and other stuff in our GI tract. The 2 big species, if you look at human microflora, are Lactobacillus species, of which there's a lot of different subspecies, and Bifidobacterium species or Bifidobacter species. So, a lot of times with people who are really fragile or they're just coming off chemotherapy or there's other things going on and we're worried about giving them non-human strains, we'll stick to human microflora strains, so-called HMF. And you can Look those up. They're very reputable, you know, companies, supplement companies that make human microflora strains. There are different types of strains that have been used in medical research, which sometimes, you know, gastroenterologists might recommend to you, et cetera. The human microflora are going to be built around Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, and then maybe some support types of bacteria in there. But what can they do for me? Well, they can impact my immune system by reestablishing a good immunity in the GI tract, which talks— the GI immune system talks to the peripheral immune system. Huge, huge thing. Can help improve digestion. There's actually research now showing that it can help with mood. And there's even a lot of research coming out now, especially around the Bifidobacterium strains, about resistance to infectious agents, viral infectious agents, et cetera, and recovery from infectious agents, whether they're of any type. Now, for some people, they may notice effects very, very soon because they haven't really damaged the GI tract. We see this with little children a lot too, but often it's a low and slow type of thing. You're normally looking at, you know, billions of organisms because they're very small, obviously, in a dose. Children are going to get less, bigger adults maybe more, sicker adults maybe more. But generally speaking, we're going to use them during and after antibiotics, during probably and after chemotherapy, other types of stressful treatments, and a lot of times just if we're trying to get the GI tract back online. Now, what might happen that might make you say, huh, I wonder if these probiotics are not good for me? One of the most common things that we see is people that have a lot of digestive reactions. And I'm not talking about a little bit of gas and bloating for a few days or a little diarrhea or whatever for a few days. That, that's kind of normal for a bit. But if you have reactions that get more GI inflammatory, more diarrhea, constipation, or alternating diarrhea, constipation, other problems that go and you're just getting sicker as you take probiotics, number one, stop. But number 2, you might have small intestinal overgrowth syndromes like SIBO and SIFO. And it's really common in people with small intestinal bacterial and fungal overgrowth that taking the probiotics has this escalating negative effect, at least for symptoms that they feel. So if you've had that experience, you want to go to somebody who works with bacterial overgrowth syndromes and be tested for that. Otherwise, generally, except for initially maybe a little bit of digestive changes after you start taking probiotics, they work really well. And you just get better and healthier as you go along. All right, that's a quick one on probiotics and why you might need to take them. I'm Dr. A. Thank you for listening to the channel. Like, share, subscribe, do all the stuff. We're going to put up some other videos to take a look at here, and I'll see you on the next video.
