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After reading your original comment I stocked up on Biogaia. I’m 3 days into the tablet and will soon start experimenting with culturing for yoghurt. I suspect they had a decent sales bump this week.

Most people here would doubtless prefer not to science-by-anecdote, but when you’ve got this kind of condition you’re willing to try pretty much anything once.

> I’m 3 days into the tablet and will soon start experimenting with culturing for yoghurt.

I’ve heard tell of people “training” kefir grains to uptake other strains of bacteria through repeated exposure during the culturing process. I wonder if you could get a more stable culture by introducing kefir grains to that yogurt for a playdate. I’d imagine some concerted initial exposure plus a periodic Reuteri booster would give you kefir grains that’ll perpetuate the strains you want. Perhaps it would be enough to crush a few tablets in some milk before adding kefir grains, but the yogurt first approach seems easy enough if you have an instapot or other yogurt making device.

Yogurt is easy to make in an ordinary pan too:

1. Turn your oven light on

2. Heat milk to 180F (I heat on Hi to 165F while stirring then turn it down), hold it there for 10 mins. Shoot for 180F but it's not a big deal if it goes to 190F.

3. Cool while stirring in a sink of water to 110F, take it out of the sink.

4. Stir in your starter. I use a popular probiotic on Amazon: open 3 capsules for half gallon of yogurt

5. Ferment in the oven for 24 hours to ensure all sugar is used, making the yogurt lactose-free.

6. Refrigerate

I´ve been making my non-dairy yoghurt (I'm allergic to Casein) for some time. One recommendation I always emphasize is that the first batch of yogurt you make with probiotics direct from the capsules will be "just ok". You should reuse some of the yogurt from the previous batch as a "starter" for a new batch. Once you do this for 3 or 4 times, the consistency of the yogurt improves considerably.

Whatdo you use instead of milk?

I use a combination of things: Sometimes liquified almonds (thick almond milk?) sometimes Cashews, sometimes oats. The best results I've had is with a combination of those three.

Having experimented with introducing bacteria into my gut biome before, be prepared for potential negative outcomes - with some stuff from a local biotech startup myself and a few others suffered bloating, gas, and more disgusting outcomes that I won't bother describing.

Its kind of a crapshoot if your guts will adjust well or not, and how long it takes for the adjustment to occur.

Thank you for your post. I bought the product you used and had my first tablet 10 minutes ago.

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

One thing that might interest people on the FODMAP diet is that the first ingredients on the list are isomalt (probably ok) and xylitol (an artificial sweetener). Hopefully the amounts are small enough not to trigger symptoms.

There's also 'Bacilac Femina' which contains reuteri and has less FODMAPs.

Thanks again!

Xylitol isn't 'artificial'[1] (but it is bad for dogs). In small amounts I would be surprised if it would affect anyone negatively, I often have 5-10g in my oats, but all the sugar alcohols make your guts unhappy in large doses (I find erythritol is the worst, but sorbitol from pears is famous for doing that to babies).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol#Structure,_production,...

Perhaps 'less digestible sweetener' would be a better way of putting it. It's a shame you don't believe it would affect people with chronic digestive issues.

I'm sure plenty of my beliefs are shameful, this one seems pretty mild by comparison... but clearly anyone who's worried about eating them should start small, and discontinue if they react badly?

It seems outrageous that a probiotic should contain xylitol, which is often catastrophic for people with IBD/IBS. Can anyone recommend a probiotic without sweetener or filler?

I suffered from terrible IBS-C for over 20 years, and just about 6 months ago I stumbled upon some probiotics called Xaviax [1] (specifically their Mexican brand, called Pavia). Since taking them, my life has changed. I had taken other kinds of probiotics, prebiotics and done everything you can imagine in the 20 years I've had this condition. Now I feel way way better.

Just got a box of L. reuteri, hopefully it will make me feel even better.

[1] https://xaviax.com/

There was once a research group in a university that found a specific diet helping/curing crohn's. However a food/health conglomerate with a product in the market for the disease paid the professor to shelf the research and it never saw the light of day.

Speaking with one of the researchers he keeps telling me that food diversity and gut microbiome are extremely important for all shorts of things. So your comment doesn't surprise me, I am glad you became better.

This reads like a classic "Big Pharma" conspiracy tale without further substantiation.

It wouldn't be the first time Big Pharma did something harmful to society in order to protect its profit margins. You don't seriously think there is a moral stance that leads one to conclude Big Pharma is benevolent and always looking out for humanity?

The key word here is "substantiation" aka "evidence".

No, the key word here, is: trust. You have more of it than you should for Big Pharma, given that that the facts of historical precedent, combined with the economics of addiction that are clearly exploited by the industry, do not support such subservient trust.

Have you never thought about the Pusher and Junkie relationship, at industrial scale? Because that is what Big Pharma is all about.

I am familiar with the Oxycontin drug pushing scandal. However, that doesn't automatically mean I'm going to start trusting unsourced internet comments; that way lies ivermectin madness.

Basically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080840 : "some guy" is not good enough.

Yeah, the situation is far worse than the Oxycontin scandal alone, which is really just the tip of the iceberg and is not an outlier situation with this industry:

> American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc. (hereinafter together "Pfizer") have agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products, the Justice Department announced today.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...

You should start being a lot, lot more suspicious of claims made by Big Pharma, and start holding them actually accountable for their very real crimes. Anything less is complicity with an industry well-known for exploiting the pusher/junkie equation.

Didn't you get the memo? Big Pharma is now the good guys as they gave us those fantastic covid vaccines.

Even for actors that I personally believe to be evil, I like to have more evidence than "there is this dude who was paid not to published, trust me".

I would say that Big Food hiring food scientists to specifically tune the flavor profile of mass manufactured foods to never trigger satiation so that people would not stop eating them even when they are mechanically full is pretty evil.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/food-cravings-engineered-by-i...

Add in that most food doesn't taste like real food anymore and is engineered to make us crave more:

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9070255/dorito-effect

And you have a perfect recipe for evil.

Big food came into existence thanks to scientific advancements that enabled the world to meet the needs of its population, and that's a good thing. Fertilizers and industrial agriculture has been a massive boon to most of the world, but allowing companies that have private shareholders to commandeer the ship and start steering it in a way that best benefits those shareholders over the best interests of the rest of the world has, in my opinion, created a system that has turned a great good into a perfidious evil.

Okay, but what has that to do with Big X suppressing a diet that cures Crohn's disease?

Sometimes the need to "win" an argument can come second. The story here is about corporate greed. I can easily imagine a team meeting where someone brought up the research and people knew it might hurt sales even if it turns out that its not replicable or anything. No one probably said "lets buy it out so people won't be cured", I assume it was an innovation manager pitching "we can make a new supplements formula based on the nutritional value of this diet". Business people agreed, knowing its a win-win. Next agenda item.

The relationship between diet, microbiome, and health is fascinating.

Another metabolite of L. reuteri is ergothioneine, which is hypothesized to be a "longevity vitamin"[1] by biologist Bruce Ames[2]. Plants and animals cannot synthesize it, only fungi and bacteria, but it is found in every cell in our body including in high concentrations in mitochondria. It appears to be important enough that mammals have evolved a specialized transporter for uptake of this compound (SLC22A4), and mutations in this gene are associated with Crohn's disease.

Low levels of it have been linked to cognitive impairment, CVD, even depression and sleep disorders[3].

Macros aren't everything when it comes to diet, there's a whole universe of micronutrient interactions ongoing in our cells every day. Since we are in a position of relatively near total ignorance, I agree that we should pursue food diversity by default.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1809045115 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Ames#Notable_awards [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-020-0855-1

Why is the parent comment not being downvoted to oblivion? It is making specific, deterministic claims and providing absolutely no sources whatsoever.

How does the OP know? Which university was it? Which research group? If "a research group" "found something worked" then there would be a trail of research papers leading up to whatever the patentable invention is.

This anecdote is a complete fabrication: events like this plain do not happen and shouldn't pass the snifftest for anyone: "a professor was paid off" - oh okay, well what about his graduate students? Honors students?

Why must we "downvote it to oblivion" just because the comment doesn't provide the particular info you want? I'd like more info, too, but I'm OK with just leaving the comment as it is instead of throwing a polemic fit over it.

1. I don't win anything by accusing a conglomerate with names on the internet. I don't mind being downvoted "to oblivion". I think I haven't because anyone interacting with such organisations imagines that this is not conspiracy, its business 2. I want to clarify that the company didn't say "we pay you X to keep it unpublished" they said "Oh thats interesting, we want to buy it to develop something based on it" and then they did nothing with it because it would canibalize their market. 3. Students that worked on this knew it, but they did nothing about it, the one I know the story from told me "what could I do? I finished my thesis and left, it was above me" and he actually works on a pharma now. I imagine being a vocal ethicist in this field would have left him without a job. Not something many people can afford.

"Oh thats interesting, we want to buy it to develop something based on it"

But it's a diet. There's nothing to sell with a diet, so again, what are you talking about?

But you know what let's run with this for a moment because it comes up a lot: you know what happens when a research group has an exciting new X, sells the patent on it and then nothing appears to happen? It doesn't actually work.

This story comes up a lot and frankly, HN should realise it: products are hard, hardware is even harder, try doing bio-anything even more so

There's not a conspiracy, which you are still trying to push with your comments here, the answer is just that it turns out not to work that well. Or that "revolutionary" actually means "minor overall improvement we generally expect from the market".

I appreciate your scepticism. I would probably do the same. Unfortunately I can't provide more information because its second-hand story and I just trust this person. Hence I did not verify everything they said. I do not know what kind of product they could develop from a diet (or if they ever wanted to). I know they had a product out for this and its an obvious conflict of interest.

I am not pushing any conspiracy here, my main points here was that gut microbiome is cutting edge research, and its actually a multi-disciplinary one since most nutritionists don't know a lot about the gut, and most gut doctors don't know a lot about nutrition (at least where I live). IBD is a prime candidate that I know of (but unfortunately I don't have a paper about it, because of whatever conspiracy or corporate greed reason) that can be helped with nutrition. But i've seen papers around talking about mental effects of the gut health too.

Well... what was the diet? I have UC. I've found that the less I eat, the better my symptoms are, but I can't eat exclusively protein smoothies and kimchi forever.