3 ms·

Out of curiosity, how does this compare to mixing diverse cultures of probiotics with short chained fatty acids and injecting them rectally?

diamondo25 4y ago
Not a doctor, but I suppose its because its a complete mix and easier to do, because theres almost no prep needed?
polskibus 4y ago
Probiotics mix would be orders of magnitude less diverse.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  I am also curious about that as well. How many strains of beneficial bacteria are in feces? The probiotics I use have 20 beneficial strains but the company won't send me a non-capsule pack of the powder. They also have one with 36 strains, 120 billion CFU so it takes a lot of capsules to get a meaningful amount and takes a long time to open all the capsules. Based on my limited research it appears stool has about 100 billion per gram of wet stool but it also contains a lot of other material some of which may be harmful.
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    My understanding is that a lot of the beneficial organisms dining the presence of oxygen, making it challenging to collect, multiply, and package them into pills or powder. Perhaps this is why they only offer the pills, the powder form in a jar would render some of them ineffective?
    - LinuxBender 4y ago
      I was thinking a sealed Mylar bag with O2 absorbers but I can see the cost issue that may arise especially if only a few self experimenters like me were interested to begin with.
      - iancmceachern 4y ago
        As soon as you open the bag it's all exposed to o2. In a blister pack each does is in its own little chamber so when you open one dose it doesn't impact the others. An interesting aside, they started doing this kind of thing in the last few years for inhalers. There are some medicines that come as a fey powder, and need to be inhaled as such. It's a challenge to keep a bunch of doses together in one container and dose doses out without impacting the rest, so they do the same thing. The inhalers have little blister packs with individual doses in them, each time you need to take a puff you rotate the inhaler which advances to the next dose, pops the blister pack, and then you inhale.
        LinuxBender 4y ago
        It's probably OK if a percentage of them are damaged by the O2. If I take 4 to 8 trillion each time it just means I would have to do it more often. The only alternative I know is the usual and incorrect in my opinion way people consume probiotics which is significantly worse. Most are destroyed by the hydrochloride acid, digestive enzymes and bile. Worse, some of them survive and have to pass through the small intestine which is absolutely the wrong place for bacteria to exist, especially if there is even the slightest amount of inflammation of the junctions and especially if some remain in the mucus layer and grow in numbers potentially leading to SIBO. With my current method they go straight into a container of short chained fatty acids which I understand they can feed off of for a while. The SCFA are also beneficial for the large intestine.
  - massaman_yams 4y ago
    Table S3 here[1] starting on page 9 appears to show nearly 80 different genuses within stool samples after filtering out "vegetative (non–spore form) bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses" [2]. No word on how many strains per genus, but reasonable to assume multiple, if not hundreds in some cases. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2106516/suppl_file/nejmoa2106516_appendix.pdf https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2106516/suppl_f... [2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2106516 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2106516
    - LinuxBender 4y ago
      On nice! I will save that one and read up on each species. I think it would be useful to know which of those are beneficial and are missing from the 20 I utilize.
stevenwoo 4y ago
Not exactly your question, but my reading of The Gene: An Intimate History says any microbiome changes from eating fermented foods like yogurt/kefir/kimchi disappears when the food leaves ones diet. This was published in 2015 so could be superceded by subsequent studies in same field and I didn't bother researching the studies referenced in the book, either. The book also talks about successful uses of fecal matter transplants (FMT) for c. difficile treatment, and it worked about 90% of the time, but required a periodic refresh because none of the patients in the studies could maintain the healthy microbiome without the FMT after a year or so.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  correction, the first note about fermented foods came from Burn(2022).

diamondo25 4y ago

Not a doctor, but I suppose its because its a complete mix and easier to do, because theres almost no prep needed?

polskibus 4y ago

Probiotics mix would be orders of magnitude less diverse.

LinuxBender 4y ago
I am also curious about that as well. How many strains of beneficial bacteria are in feces? The probiotics I use have 20 beneficial strains but the company won't send me a non-capsule pack of the powder. They also have one with 36 strains, 120 billion CFU so it takes a lot of capsules to get a meaningful amount and takes a long time to open all the capsules. Based on my limited research it appears stool has about 100 billion per gram of wet stool but it also contains a lot of other material some of which may be harmful.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  My understanding is that a lot of the beneficial organisms dining the presence of oxygen, making it challenging to collect, multiply, and package them into pills or powder. Perhaps this is why they only offer the pills, the powder form in a jar would render some of them ineffective?
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    I was thinking a sealed Mylar bag with O2 absorbers but I can see the cost issue that may arise especially if only a few self experimenters like me were interested to begin with.
    - iancmceachern 4y ago
      As soon as you open the bag it's all exposed to o2. In a blister pack each does is in its own little chamber so when you open one dose it doesn't impact the others. An interesting aside, they started doing this kind of thing in the last few years for inhalers. There are some medicines that come as a fey powder, and need to be inhaled as such. It's a challenge to keep a bunch of doses together in one container and dose doses out without impacting the rest, so they do the same thing. The inhalers have little blister packs with individual doses in them, each time you need to take a puff you rotate the inhaler which advances to the next dose, pops the blister pack, and then you inhale.
      - LinuxBender 4y ago
        It's probably OK if a percentage of them are damaged by the O2. If I take 4 to 8 trillion each time it just means I would have to do it more often. The only alternative I know is the usual and incorrect in my opinion way people consume probiotics which is significantly worse. Most are destroyed by the hydrochloride acid, digestive enzymes and bile. Worse, some of them survive and have to pass through the small intestine which is absolutely the wrong place for bacteria to exist, especially if there is even the slightest amount of inflammation of the junctions and especially if some remain in the mucus layer and grow in numbers potentially leading to SIBO. With my current method they go straight into a container of short chained fatty acids which I understand they can feed off of for a while. The SCFA are also beneficial for the large intestine.
- massaman_yams 4y ago
  Table S3 here[1] starting on page 9 appears to show nearly 80 different genuses within stool samples after filtering out "vegetative (non–spore form) bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses" [2]. No word on how many strains per genus, but reasonable to assume multiple, if not hundreds in some cases. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2106516/suppl_file/nejmoa2106516_appendix.pdf https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2106516/suppl_f... [2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2106516 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2106516
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    On nice! I will save that one and read up on each species. I think it would be useful to know which of those are beneficial and are missing from the 20 I utilize.

stevenwoo 4y ago

Not exactly your question, but my reading of The Gene: An Intimate History says any microbiome changes from eating fermented foods like yogurt/kefir/kimchi disappears when the food leaves ones diet. This was published in 2015 so could be superceded by subsequent studies in same field and I didn't bother researching the studies referenced in the book, either. The book also talks about successful uses of fecal matter transplants (FMT) for c. difficile treatment, and it worked about 90% of the time, but required a periodic refresh because none of the patients in the studies could maintain the healthy microbiome without the FMT after a year or so.

stevenwoo 4y ago
correction, the first note about fermented foods came from Burn(2022).