Dr Oz: ‘Digestive Problems or Weak Immune System? Here’s the Key to Vibrant Health’
I first heard about Bacillus coagulans in 1995 when I read abstracts of human clinical studies conducted in India using this probiotic.
Similar to Bacillus subtilis, bacillus coagulans is a spore-forming bacterium that survives the hostile environment of the stomach, colonizes the intestines, and produces lactic acid, which are all components to the success of a good probiotic. Bacillus coagulans was first isolated in 1932 by German scientists L.M. Horowitz-Wlassowa and N.W. Nowotelnow. Further research confirmed that upon activation of spore formation in the acidic environment of the stomach, Bacillus coagulans can germinate and proliferate in the intestines and produce lactic acid, which are critical factors to the success of a probiotic.
Bacillus coagulans isn’t entirely unknown in the popular culture. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a once-regular guest on Oprah’s iconic show and mega-selling author (along with Dr. Michael F. Roizen) of the You: The Manual series, outlined the importance of having beneficial bacteria in your gut for maintaining digestive and immune health on her show. Oprah responded by saying “Pro-by-what?” In You: Staying Young, Dr. Oz recommended taking “two billion cells of healthy bowel bacteria like bacillus coagulans” as a choice to consider.
Dr. Oz really went to bat for probiotics, echoing what I’ve been saying all along in The Probiotic Diet. Here’s an excerpt:
Dr. Oz: In a basic sense, you have a war inside your intestine between your good and your bad bacteria—in fact over 90 percent of the cells in your body are not yours. Probiotics are living bacteria that help you stack the war’s outcome in favor of good or bad health-promoting bacteria.
Probiotics can be found either as tablets or as capsules or in certain foods like yogurts. Eating bacteria may seem like a rather strange idea, because when we think of bacteria, we often think about the “bad” bacteria or “germs” that can make us sick—things like salmonella in under-cooked chicken or bacterial infections. But you have and you rely on trillions and trillions of “good” bacteria to keep your digestive and immune systems functioning properly. However, the levels of these “good” bacteria can decline due to factors such as age, diet, stress, and even with the use of antibiotics. When this happens, you can run into digestive problems and your immune system can be weakened.
This is where probiotics really come in. Probiotics are reinforcements to restore the level of “good” bacteria in your body. That’s one of the reasons why a pharmacist or your physician may suggest taking probiotics or eating specific yogurts after taking a course of antibiotics.
By this point, you might be ready to go out and look for probiotics to add to your daily routine. Interestingly, this simple act may be the most difficult aspect of probiotics to grasp—isn’t yogurt all around us? Not so fast. The important thing to remember is to provide benefits to you, probiotics must survive not only sitting on the shelf in your home and in the store, but they must also make their way past the harsh stomach acids to reach your intestinal tract where they then must grow and thrive. Thus it isn’t the number contained in the pill or in the container, it’s the number that survive into your intestine (notice I said your).
Different strains of probiotics differ greatly in their abilities to do this. Most conventional forms of lactobacilli, found in many probiotic yogurt mixes, are inactivated by stomach acids, while Bifidobacteria, another popular strain found in some yogurts and supplements, is often inactivated by high heat.
Bacillus coagulans, a probiotic that protects itself by developing its own protective shell, is one of the most exciting strains of “good” bacteria to come around. Why? Because it can withstand extreme temperatures and the harsh acid in the stomach. Because of its unique ability to survive these conditions, bacillus coagulans is even being added into foods that were not otherwise possibilities, like baked goods and dry soup mixes. Those are in addition to the normal supplements that bacillus coagulans can be found in. [1]
The other probiotic I recommend, Saccharomyces boulardii, is not a spore-forming bacteria but a friendly yeast that supports healthy digestion. Saccharomyces boulardii is often used to counter antibiotic therapy or fight diarrhea since this live microorganism has been shown to destroy pathogenic bacteria in the bowels.
The story of how Saccharomyces boulardii was discovered sounds like the one told by Dr. Rothschild about the Afrika Korps. A French microbiologist named Henri Boulard traveled to Indo-china in the 1920s, a long, arduous journey to be sure, but one driven by Dr. Boulard’s drive to find a heat-resistant yeast that could be used to ferment beverages above 70° Fahrenheit. Like the German Army scientists who studied what the locals were doing to keep from dying from dysentery, Dr. Boulard observed what the local population ate and drank when they got diarrhea. He happened to observe the Vietnamese drinking a tea from litchi fruit skins to combat a cholera epidemic, which is marked by severe diarrhea.
Intrigued, Dr. Boulard studied the litchi fruit tea and conducted painstaking research before managing to isolate the yeast responsible for curing the locals’ diarrhea. Since he performed the original microbiological detective work—and had a bigger ego than Dr. Cutting—Dr. Boulard named the yeast after himself: Saccharomyces boulardii.
Mais bien sur! But of course.
Saccharomyces boulardii became commercialized after World War II in Europe before reaching American shores around 50 years ago. Medical studies over the intervening decades have confirmed what Vietnamese folklore has known for centuries: if you have bad diarrhea, then Saccharomyces boulardii can help. This friendly yeast can also relieve the bloating and gas that often go with unbalanced terrain. Further research also highlighted Saccharomyces boulardii’s ability to repair the mucous membranes lining the intestinal walls and strengthen immune function in the digestive tract.
I first heard of Saccharomyces boulardii when I was introduced to a third-generation baker and fermentation expert from Australia in 1999. I immediately began researching and consuming this organism and noticed excellent benefits. I highly recommend and strongly urge that you make these spore-formed probiotics and friendly yeast part of your daily nutritional regimen.
It’s a Question of Potency
I love traveling to the West Coast, and whenever I arrive in Southern California, the first thing I do is ask the locals where to find a raw food or health food restaurant. It seems like I always get directed to one of those quintessential New Age restaurants—the ones filled with chakras, Buddhas, wind chimes, and more crystals than you could shake a talisman at. The tattooed staff—and clientele—may have a lot of piercings and dreadlocks, but the yummy-for-the-tummy organic entrees are to die for.
I also ask directions to the nearest health food store, where I stock up on raw snacks—nuts, dairy, salads, and drinks—and take them back to my hotel room for dessert and breakfast the following morning. It was on a trip to Orange County when I first heard about a probiotic beverage called Yakult. If the Golden State’s reputation as a bellwether state pans out, you could be seeing Yakult’s five-pack of 2.7-ounce bottles in your supermarket dairy case soon.
I can see you scratching your head. What’s Yakult?
Yakult consists of skimmed milk powder, sugar, water, and a bacteria called Lactobacillus casei shirota, a probiotic named after its creator, Japanese microbiologist Dr. Minoru Shirota. In 1935, Dr. Shirota was attempting to create a probiotic that would help people during a time when infectious disease mortality rates were high. Yakult has been around ever since, mainly in Asia. Yakult is sold in more than 30 countries, but it didn’t reach American shores until late 2008 when a beachhead was established in California, Nevada, and Arizona.
The mixture of skimmed milk powder, sugar, and water is ultra-pasteurized, then fermented using Lactobacillus casei shirota. A 65-milliliter plastic bottle (2.7 fluid ounces) contains 6.5 billion—that’s not a typo—Lactobacillus casei shirota that support maintenance of gut flora and regulate bowel habits and constipation.
We’ll see if Yakult generates the necessary buzz to expand its sales territories nationwide, but I can assure you that you won’t find Yakult in the Rubin family refrigerator. The skimmed milk powder is missing what I call the “Original Probiotics” following pasteurization. I don’t drink beverages with sugar, and I don’t think lactobacillus-based probiotics are the best probiotics you can consume.
But that’s not what you hear from the marketing campaigns behind the big food companies producing dairy-based probiotics. I hope I’ve given the impression that I’m not totally down on dairy products and their lactic acid bacteria; you can certainly derive some wonderful nutrients from cultured dairy, preferably unpasteurized and unhomogenized.
It is my belief, however, that the wonderful benefits associated with consuming raw, fermented dairy lies in the predigested proteins, carbohydrates, and fats as well as the organic acids produced by the organisms and not the lactobacillus probiotics that produce the health-giving qualities. So in a sense, Élie Metchnikoff was right about cultured dairy benefiting those healthy Bulgarians, but I believe it was due to the fermented dairy itself and not the lactobacilli. That’s why for me, the issue comes down to potency. By the time the stomach has had its fun with lactic acid bacteria, these dairy-based probiotics are weakened and compromised—perhaps decimated—as they travel on to the small intestine.
The reason why consuming lactic acid bacteria doesn’t work in the long run can be told through a parable about sea turtles. I used to live in South Florida, where sea turtles fall under the state’s Marine Turtle Protection Program. Florida loves their sea turtles, and you can even select an attractive sea turtle license plate for your car that features a loggerhead hatchling crawling on the beige sand toward the blue water.
That image is apropos because very few—very, very few—baby sea turtles ever make it back to the water and grow to maturity. Marine biologists say that mama sea turtles may lay a thousand eggs during mating season, but only one survives to adulthood. You wouldn’t want to take those odds to Las Vegas.
The period between nesting and the first year of life is the most treacherous for sea turtles. It all begins when Mama Sea Turtle leaves the sea and digs a nest in the sand. She lays hundreds and hundreds of eggs in a pile, then covers the nest and returns to the sea. She will never see her babies. Meanwhile, the sun keeps the sand and therefore the eggs warm and dry.
The turtle eggs are defenseless. A dog’s keen sense of smell can steer it to any sea turtle eggs buried in the sand, and if Rover discovers the nest, the entire clutch of turtle eggs can be quickly destroyed. In some areas of the world, humans comb the beaches for nests because sea turtle eggs are a culinary delicacy.
If the turtle eggs remain unmolested, they eventually hatch, and here’s where things get tricky. The tiny turtles must get to the sea, but they’re exposed to predators. Sea gulls circle high in the sky and swoop down. Raccoons are looking to poach a quick meal. Crabs are waiting at the water’s edge for a morning snack. If the baby turtles manage to avoid these predators and reach the ocean, all sorts of sea creatures are waiting to pounce on their next meal.
As I said, only one of those thousand turtles will survive to reproduce and start the whole process over again, but that’s how the species propagates itself.
And that’s what the world’s largest food companies are doing when they create probiotic products. They are producing Activia yogurts, Yakult drinks, and encapsulated probiotic supplements with billions of lactic acid probiotics, but untold millions of bacteria fail to survive the rough-water ride through the churning rapids inside the stomach.
Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus coagulans, and Saccharomyces boulardii don’t have that problem because they are not destroyed by heat (don’t forget that the body’s core temperature is 98.6 degrees), gastric acids in the stomach, and unfriendly bacteria residing in the gut. Lactic acid bacteria, on the other hand, have too many natural enemies in your body.
Most lactic acid bacteria are not strong enough or resilient enough to produce the right chemicals to combat the horrific conditions in your gut. I’ve already mentioned that researchers believe that a healthy person needs at least 85 percent beneficial microbes and 15 percent pathogenic or negative microbes. Eating today’s modern diet usually results in a colon that’s alkaline and not acidic, which reverses that ratio. If you send wimpy lactic acid bacteria into the gut to that ratio around, that’s like fighting a forest fire with a garden hose—naked.
The reason I like this analogy is because it relates to Lactobacillus acidophilus, which is acid-friendly dairy-based bacteria. People think acidophilus, which is the most popular probiotic species in the world, produces lactic acid that will lower your pH levels in your colon, but in reality, Lactobacillus acidophilus doesn’t lower your colon’s pH because it needs an acidic environment to thrive. So if your colon is alkaline, and you’re sending acidophilus down the hatch, it’s not going to survive the journey.
Acidophilus needs an acidic medium to survive and thrive. Furthermore, it doesn’t automatically produce B vitamins; it uses B vitamins in its metabolism. So without B vitamins and an alkaline colon, which is what most unhealthy people have, eating or drinking a lot of Lactobacillus acidophilus is like trying to fight a raging forest fire wearing nothing more than a smile and a garden hose in your hand.
Probiotics are the right answer to many of your health issues, and they have to be intentionally included in your diet. But taking probiotics willy nilly—much like I did when I gulped down 30 brands and multiple bottles of expensive probiotics each day—won’t do you any good if they are not getting where they need to go. So why play a game with probiotics when you can consume something that was created to go into the body and make it to the gastrointestinal tract, where it can set up shop and begin to do a number of wonderful things for the body?
Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus coagulans can be looked at as bio-remediation agents. They’re like those guys in white hazmat suits working an oil spill during the clean-up stages. Actually, if there is an oil spill in your garage and you go over to Home Depot to buy a cleaning agent—one of those commercial industrial products—you’ll find that the manufacturer uses bacillus microbes to break down that carbon-based oil dirtying your garage floor.
In the same manner, your colon could be plugged with undigested carbohydrates. Carbohydrates, as you would expect for a word with a Latin prefix carbo, have lots of carbon, and when these undigested carbohydrates float around your intestines, they feed and multiply bad bacteria. Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus coagulans can go in there and secrete compounds that eat away at the encrusted fecal matter and toxins.
In a sense, consuming the right probiotics is another way to “cleanse” the body. In natural health circles, those who know about cleansing say that most people carry about five to ten pounds of impacted fecal matter in their colon. That’s because they’ve seen what comes out after colon hydrotherapy—think of an enema on steroids—that infuses the colon with pressurized water. This is the old autointoxication theory at work: you can’t eat three meals a day and go to the bathroom three times a week. Something is not right with this picture because the equation doesn’t compute. So where does all that stuff go? It sits around in your colon and clogs your pipes.
Notes
Dr. Mehmet Oz’s PodCast on probiotics is available at http://www.digestiveadvantage.com/transcript_understandingprobiotics.html
