From a mailing list I’m on:
Right before I left the U.S. I purchased Complete Probiotics from Dr. Mercola (online health guru). . . . I did not have the time needed to give these probiotics a good try before I left the States so I went ahead and purchased quite a bit. After arriving here in Beijing I began taking them just to find out they were not working well for me. I still think it is a good product, just not right for me.
I have 7 bottles total. 5 bottles expiration date: May 2011. 2 bottles expiration date: Dec. 2010
This batch I have has [in each capsule] 2 billion CFU [colony-forming units] and 500 mg of FOS [Fructooligosaccharides]. There are 90 V-caps per bottle. They are all completely sealed with shrink bands
Dr. Mercola’s sale price is $30 U.S.D. for a single bottle and about $25 U.S.D./each for a 3-pack. [the 3-pack costs $75]
She doesn’t say why they’re not right for her. I make kombucha for pennies per day. Homemade yogurt costs a few dimes per day. Also, they’re delicious, the kombucha is thirst-quenching, and the yogurt, as a condiment, improves many other dishes (salmon, soup, hamburger). So they’re easy to eat, whereas the vitamin pills I take I have to force myself to swallow. Because I am close to the making of the kombucha and yogurt — I sample them during brewing — I am sure that they have plenty of bacteria. With pills made in a factory, hard to be sure. And hard to know what those expiration dates mean.
A recent post to Boing Boing (https://boingboing.net/2009/07/29/how-to-make-kombucha.html) covered making Kombucha at home but also linked to three cautionary sites including people who died quickly of acidosis after drinking homemade kombucha and an interesting review that covered how little people know the organisms that make up the drink. This scared me off from making it at home especially off a ‘mother’ from a stranger.
Since it seems like kombucha can be a host for both beneficial and toxic bacteria (https://www.fungi.com/info/articles/blob.html), I wonder how this impacts the beneficial effects. If the umami hypothesis says that foreign bacteria is needed, I wonder if long term ingestion of the same fermented/bacteria rich foods would have the same impact. Eventually, your body would have an environment that’s full of the kombucha/yogurt/etc. bacteria and the immune system wouldn’t react anymore. Without varying the sources, there seems to be a risk of accumulating both good and bad bacteria and nullifying the immune benefits.
Chris, if they died of acidosis I take that to mean they drank too much. “Eventually your body would have an environment that’s full of the kombucha/yogurt/etc. bacteria” — I don’t think that happens. The bacteria that can grow in milk or sweetened tea can’t grow in the very different environment inside our body (lactose-poor, sucrose-poor). They’re constantly dying and being sloughed off. That’s why we need to keep eating them.
I love yogurt, and I made sure to buy the culture-rich kind (Dannon FOTB, YoPlait+, etc). For a while I took it every morning. But unfortunately, after some experimentation I found that it was the cause of some rather embarrassing flatulence and other digestive problems. These problems soon abated after I stopped eating yogurt.
Perhaps I have an unusually healthy level of flora in my system already, because I can’t take any type of priobiotic without having this reaction.
Perhaps this is what the person on your mailing list meant when she said it wasn’t working well for her.