Another Study Warns of the Dangers of Commercial Probiotics
“Yeah, we labeled it as vegetarian, but it’s full of expired meat. Why are you upset?”
When I was an undergraduate, I fixated on the idea that I probably wasn’t getting enough vitamins, and that the right dietary supplement would solve all of my ills.
(Now, looking back, my problems were likely due to a combination of too much beer, too little sleep, and a definitive lack anything green in my diet. I should have left the vitamins aisle and headed over to grab a large container of spinach.)
These days, my diet is better — but there’s a new craze in the supplement world. Discussions around probiotics, supplements containing live bacteria, are all the rage.
I’ve got some background on this topic. I have a PhD in genetics, focusing on analyzing the gut microbiome. I wrote my thesis on a new method for looking at the activity of this wild, varied combination of bacteria living in our intestinal tract.
There’s still a ton for us to learn about how our gut microbiome helps — or hurts — us. It’s already tricky to consider taking probiotics, adding more bacteria to try and influence a part of our health when we don’t fully understand how it works.
