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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Fellow IBS-sufferer here. Runs in my family.

So doing a search for "Reuteri" on Amazon, I immediately see several pages worth of supplements, with such helpful reviews as "HELPS DIGESTION. ENLARGES TESTICLES."[0]

How do you separate the trustworthy supplements from the snake oil?

[0] https://a.co/d/4Qa1iy1

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There's one supplier I trust out of Sweden called Biogaia. [1] Look for the keith haring lookalike box art. I don't buy anything off of that website but it's something you can get a couple of weeks supply of from the pharmacy for under 100$.

Amazon is so full of scams, Jeff Bezos really needs to be held to account for that.

[1] https://www.biogaia.com/

> There's one supplier I trust out of Sweden called Biogaia

Which supplement from them are you referring to?

Probably https://www.biogaia.com/product/biogaia-gastrus/ ?

Yeah that's the brand, I've seen that in the USA and this in international markets [1]

[1] https://www.biogaia.com/product-country/biogaia-protectis-ch...

Thanks.

At my hospital we prescribe Lactobacillus reuteri for older patients on broad spectrum antibiotics to reduce the risk of C. difficile infection. The brand name used is ProTectis which appears to be exactly the BioGaia product another commenter was describing.

We have actually recently stopped using protectis in this way as the evidence base is too thin to justify the cost, but suffice to say that the Biogaia protectis is sufficiently genuine to be prescribed in UK hospitals.

If reddit anecdotes are to be believed the enlarged testicles are true.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/9pdrg1/my_expe...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/m3ywju/questio...

There are more but just linking these two.

In places like this on reddit, so many posts are just influencer accounts.

You'd probably be better off reading such reddit forums, and presuming the exact opposite happens.

This is another area to clean up, in the digital age.

Just echoing this. I've worked with marketing agencies who use Reddit to post things like this for their clients.

Both of those posts have the OP linking to specific products, with one of the OPs blatantly posting a referral link to a specific product.

Even without the links or mentioning specific products or brands, marketers will post things like this to build up markets, audiences and anticipation for new products, in this case it is a specific species and variant of bacteria.

It's pretty easy to suss out a lot of those accoutns just by looking at profile age and their comments. Sure, sometimes people sell their accounts but it'll be apparent eventually.

> Fellow IBS-sufferer here. Runs in my family.

I see what you did there.

Interestingly, may not be all wrong: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879365/

Yes its shitty chumbucket type marketing but there's still some potential.

Having any sort of active microbiome is probably a good idea and an intended aspect of the human digestive system. I don’t know that this one specifically is better or worse but I would probably consider probiotics a decent idea to try.

The testes thing is… I guess vaguely plausible. I’m bemused everyone in the reviews seems to be confident that this is desirable. It seems like desperate people are just flocking to some study on rats.

Sure, but the parent comment was suggesting a specific bacterium, so I would want to make sure whatever probiotics I'm buying contain it. And normally I would probably just rely on getting them through a trusted vendor (e.g. my neighborhood grocer/pharamcy/health food store), but if I'm forced to shop online to make sure it has this specific thing in it...I want something I can check to vouch for its quality, yeah?

For example, pretty much every bottle of probiotics you buy will claim it contains "Over XX billion CFUs (colony-forming units?) in every pill!" But, are more better? Are they the right kind? Will I get 60 billion CFUs in a pill if I just dehydrate some pond water?

> And normally I would probably just rely on getting them through a trusted vendor (e.g. my neighborhood grocer/pharamcy/health food store), but if I'm forced to shop online to make sure it has this specific thing in it...I want something I can check to vouch for its quality, yeah?

Oddly enough, with the food/supplement I'm most familiar with, kava, the worst quality you can find is in brick and mortar establishments. The trusted vendors are all online-only and dedicated entirely to the one product instead of just trying to stock their shelves with every supplement on the planet.

Well I guess my thought process (however incorrect it might be) is that from a food safety perspective--not necessarily a supplement efficacy perspective--there's a greater bar to pass for the FDA to allow something to sit on the shelf at CVS than to get it from some random vendor on Amazon that might not even reside in the US.

I see. The fact is, the FDA doesn't regulate what's in supplements so it could be grass in those pills whether they come from Utah or Uttar Pradesh.

As for food safety, the standards are the same whether manufactured in the US or outside. The FDA ensures they comply with HARPC and are made in cGMP facilities.

https://iherb.com/search?kw=Reuterin

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