It’s interesting that both groups had their number of bowel movements double or more. Perhaps a lot of constipation is actually dehydration.

How does one actually go about procuring good probiotics? Short of doctor I mean

Best gut related health I ever had was living in France and eating stinky raw cheeses and different fermented foods. Like clockwork.

There is a lot of confusion on how to interpret studies.

The reasoning of this article seems to be "The study did not produce a significant result, therefore the treatment is ineffective".

But that is not how to think about significance.

Otherwise, you could show for any treatment that it is ineffective. By simply doing a study small enough to produce an insignificant result.

Don't buy probiotics - eat quality grass-fed organic yogurt (such as Trimona [0]) and home-made sauerkraut - these have centuries of evidence. As a Bulgaria, we traditional make sauerkraut every year. It's pretty easy to have it, you just need a little more attention to it in the first weeks. The juice is amazing, too. You can buy it from Amazon [1].

[0]: https://trimonafoods.com/

[1]: https://amzn.to/3ZO0Sxl

Why is it interesting to just test one brand of probiotic with a single strain of bacteria?

Surprised to see it on arstechnica and HN.

Huberman [1] lists several studies emphasising mucrobiota diversity and health as the major factor. These studies seen to find that the way to get it is fermented foods, like sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir etc. and that commercial probiotics don't seem to do much.

[1] https://www.hubermanlab.com/newsletter/6-key-tools-to-improv...

For what it's worth, I always thought that yogurts, etc. are better at slowing down digestion/dealing with diarrhea than constipation.

I'd never heard a single strain could affect constipation, so these results unsurprising.

Where attention to the gut biome has really saved lives is when a person has massive Clostridium difficile overgrowth – which is more associated with uncontrollable diarrhea than constipation. This state of extreme illness is typically only possible because prior antibiotic use cleared out the natural variety of commensal bacteria that normally keeps this particular strain at bay (or totally absent).

In such cases, people near death can bounce back after a full-spectrum "fecal microbiome transplant" (FMT) where all of the hundreds-or-more of distinct bacterial species are transferred from a healthy donor to the patient.

It's quite hard to package all those sensitive, beneficial, adapted-just-to-the-human-gut strains for reproducible evaluation & administration – so FMT is hard to fit into standard medical studies & FDA approval processes.

But sometimes a mere dot's worth of a healthy person's feces can be a miracle cure for someone else! So, a company has driven an approval of their particular $10k-per-treatment shit-pill through FDA processes, and partially as a consequence, the FDA has been cracking down on people arranging FMTs in less-formal & far-cheaper ways – despite a great record of safety and effectiveness.

A well-informed & highly-opinionated rant on this topic: "A Monopoly on Poop" https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/a-monopoly-on-poop

Apparently almost any strain of lactobacillus should be able to make some type of yogurt (each one with a distinct flavor). I have taken relatively expensive probiotic supplements sold in a very famous supermarket in the US known for this type of thing (yes, that one), which claim to have close to a dozen strains of lactobacillus. It was utterly incapable of even beginning to make yogurt. It was just plain milk at the end of the process, not even a discernible yogurty taste to it. On the other hand, we had great success using a cheap yogurt starter we found sitting around that had expired 5 years ago. I would love to have a full spectrum of probiotics, but can't spend the money to actually find one that works, so I have to stick to homemade yogurt.

After getting really annoyed with the pseudoscientific naming around this I built a whole site about it a couple of decades ago to get to the top of search results and got threatened with a lawsuit by Danone...

https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/

The thing that has treated acute IBS episodes for me is ib guard. The green box. Though I'm pretty sure the primary ingredient is just peppermint oil.

This is about Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis.

Personally I take L. Reuteri supplements, which for me have made an unbelievable difference in suffering from IBS symptoms (and have some clinical evidence to support having an effect). This was a result a recommendation somewhere else on HN about 2 years ago now, so I'll pass it forward whenever the topic comes up.

In my experience it took about 3 months to see effects (during which time I did feel somewhat worse), and currently if something happens - i.e. I get sick - then there's a bit of reversion towards feeling bad. But: I was also able to stop taking them for about 6-9 months before it seemed like the effect was diminishing.

Should be noted that constipation relief is far from the only benefit that probiotics provide to your gut biome. Healthy gut biome has been linked to lower levels of depression and lots of other things seemingly unrelated.

More specifically "probiotic X didn't work for Chinese people with constipation"

But that's a typical arstechnica title

The headline is some of the best output I've recently seen.

Whenever some theme gets broad advertising, I get suspicious. "Helps boost the immune system!" -- WTF does that mean?

"Probiotics for gut health!" -- yeah, right. Get back to me in 10 years when you have some actual evidence.

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im over ars

If you want to improve your gut health, stop eating meat and go vegan. But most of you would rather take meds instead.