The study on probiotics that he commented on in that article was interesting.
"So, what was unique about this study, really interesting, is that previous studies have looked at this question of if you take probiotics, does it really change your gut flora? Does it create a permanent change in your gut flora? And a couple earlier studies used stool microscopy to answer that question, stool culture, and I think we’ve talked about that on a previous show. That’s basically where they take stool and they put it under a microscope or they culture it and they look for organisms, whether beneficial organisms or pathological organisms, in the stool. And it’s not very accurate for a number of reasons, but one reason is the culture can’t identify certain strains of bacteria very well.
So, this study, instead of using a stool culture, they used DNA PCR analysis, which is a much more accurate way of characterizing the commensal gut flora, and so they administered VSL3 at a pretty high dose. I think that people were taking about 600 to 900 billion CFU a day, which is a very high dose, and they did that for a period of time. They looked at their gut flora before they started taking the VSL3, and then they looked at the gut flora at the end of the study after they had taken it. And they found in the study that, sure enough, the people who took the probiotics experienced significant improvements in a number of different ways, but they also found that the gut microbiota in those people was essentially unchanged from the beginning to the end of the study, which is really interesting, right? It sorta goes against our idea of what probiotics are doing."
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