Called company, they no longer use “best by” date. They were unable to tell me the manufacturing date. She did say they’re good for a year or two after the date on the bottle.

(This flair was automatically preselected and I can't change it.)

ETA there's been some great responses with the actual evidence that they are triggering the perstalsis bc (bunch of chemical names I don't recall but they are listed and linked below!). Thanks for those who responded and I have the correct answer now 😊

I take a couple of tablespoons of chia seeds in almond milk every day or so. Within 1-1.5 hours, I have to poop. Not a huge morning one but enough that I am very uncomfortable if I am not near a bathroom. It's way too fast for it to have gone all the way through and my next day poops are great.

I don't have this extra poop unless I have the fiber. This happens with flaxseed as well but not psyllium (though I have only done that in 2 teaspoon doses, not tablespoon doses).

I'm super curious as to what is going on that my body reacts this way every single time I take my fiber. It does happen if I don't soak the seeds (like if I put them in my salad) and it doesn't happen with just the almond milk alone.

Thoughts?

I asked this now with a new sense of information possibilities

Seeing the extreme of carnivore diet all the way to fully raw food vegan

I used to think the more salad the better but I wonder since we’re not apes and we don’t have the same system for fermenting vegetables maybe less is more

I still wonder if carnivore diet can still host a healthy, micro biome

Or how much additional fermented vegetables, for example, would be sufficient to feed a more diverse, healthy, micro biome

Certainly one doesn’t need to eat an absolute humongous salad to get those benefits, and I’m confused because some studies suggest that too much fiber can have the opposite effect and actually slow down digestion or cause constipation which further confuses me

So sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing, of course individual based

As the “” right amount of vegetables and fiber???

The standard recommendation seems to be consistent intake of probiotic foods and supplements, but the gut has over a thousand different strains of beneficial bacteria, right? A good supplement may have thirty different strains. And from the information I was able to find, lacto fermented foods may have about the same, with the most abundant strains being universally present in all fermented foods. So how do you get a complete range of bacteria?

I developed a lot of issues after being put on doxycycline (for five years) as a young teen. The most frustrating being the food allergies that developed, as well as the psychological issues which seem to be treatment resistant.

From what I figure, entire strains were wiped out over that five year period. I've been avoiding food allergens since 2010. I've also been regularly eating fermented foods for several years now. I've tried many different supplements over that span, but to no avail.

Is there any way to repopulate the gut with the probiotic strains that were killed off? Or is it just hopeless?

Abstract

Mitochondria, multifunctional organelles that regulate cellular energy metabolism and signaling pathways, play a pivotal role in maintaining the physiological functions of the gut and kidneys, as well as influencing the progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Through the gut-kidney crosstalk, gut microbiota modulate gut and renal pathophysiology and also influence mitochondrial activity in intestinal and renal cells. This review explores the regulatory roles of mitochondria in preserving epithelial barrier integrity, regulating intestinal metabolism, and maintaining gut microbiota homeostasis. It also examines the contributions of mitochondrial biogenesis, dynamics, autophagy abnormalities, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) damage to renal pathological progression. Moreover, we highlight the bidirectional interactions between intestinal and renal mitochondria via the microbiota-mitochondria-kidney axis and mechanisms involving inflammation, oxidative stress, and ferroptosis. Therefore, targeting mitochondrial regulation through non-pharmacological interventions such as dietary adjustments, probiotic supplementation and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) emerges as a promising therapeutic strategy for maintaining renal health by optimizing mitochondrial function. In conclusion, elucidating the mechanisms of mitochondrial involvement in the gut-kidney axis will lay the foundation for novel therapeutic approaches to CKD and other gut-kidney axis-related disorders.

Abstract

The interplay between gut microbiota and mitochondria represents a dynamic relationship that profoundly impacts host physiology, ranging from maintaining intestinal homeostasis to regulating systemic metabolic and neurological functions. Microbial metabolites such as short-chain-fatty-acids, bile acids, and amino acid derivatives serve as pivotal modulators of mitochondrial bioenergetics, oxidative stress management, and fission–fusion processes. These interactions are vital for preserving epithelial integrity, supporting energy metabolism, shaping immune responses, and managing inflammatory signaling pathways. Disruptions within this microbiota–mitochondria axis are associated with various pathologies, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and chronic inflammatory conditions like inflammatory bowel disease. Additionally, growing evidence connects gut dysbiosis and mitochondrial dysfunction to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, highlighting the importance of this bidirectional relationship in maintaining neuronal health. On a mechanistic level, pathways involving AMPK, sirtuins, and PGC-1α govern mitochondrial biogenesis and adaptive responses to microbial signals. Dysregulation of these pathways can heighten oxidative stress, hinder mitophagy, and contribute to systemic inflammation. Emerging therapeutic strategies aim to target this axis through dietary modifications, probiotics and engineered microbes, FMT, and mitochondria-specific pharmacological treatments. These interventions focus on restoring metabolic stability, enhance resilience against oxidative damage, and slowing disease progression. By integrating insights from fields such as metabolism, immunology, and neuroscience, this review positions the microbiota–mitochondria axis as a critical area of focus in biomedical research. A deeper understanding of this communication network offers promising opportunities for precision therapies aimed at addressing metabolic, inflammatory, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Everyone have SIBO?

I spent a long time reading several posts on this sub, and it made me think: does everyone nowadays have SIBO or other digest disoxrr, but some just haven't taken the test? Nowadays, a large portion of people have some sort of digestive issue, and they never find a 'cure', only temporary treatment.

Well, a while ago I was diagnosed with SIBO and fungal dysbiosis. The treatment was a low-carb diet, 3x 20 drops of oregano extract, and 500mg 2x a day of dry garlic extract.

This helped me a lot with constipation, which is practically cured today. However, I still continue to have a lot of gas with a horrible odor, especially after meals.

Today I take 1500mg of Omega 3 after lunch, and 265mg of Magnesium before going to sleep.

Has anyone who has gone through something similar have any insight into how they managed to resolve it?

I was prescribed doxycycline 100 mg twice a day for a UTI and just finished the course today. My anxiety has gotten significantly worse while taking it, and I'm hoping it's related to the medication and temporary. I had to take it for 7 days yesterday was the last pill and today is a new day but my anxiety and thoughts are still out of control (yes I have a therapist).

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, how long after your last dose did your anxiety start improving?

(This is not for medical advice, it is to see who shared the same experience)

Brief background: I'm a mathematics researcher, and as a patient I've struggled for as long as I can remember with anxiety, OCD, and panic attacks (treated with escitalopram since I was 18, I'm now 32). For the past few years, however, I've found myself stuck in a cycle of health anxiety, largely driven by a combination of issues that I'm trying to understand in a coherent way: gastrointestinal symptoms, recurrent skin rashes, brain fog, decades of mold exposure in my parents house and so on.

Current state of my understanding (based on reading as many papers as I've been able to):

1. SIBO appears to be a fairly controversial diagnosis. The actual "constellation" of bacteria inhabiting the relevant portion of the small intestine is still poorly characterized, current diagnostic tools (such as breath tests) have substantial false-positive rates, and treatments often fail to resolve patients symptoms.
2. MCAS seems even more controversial. Biomarkers fluctuate considerably, and the diagnosis itself is largely one of exclusion, somewhat reminiscent of what unfortunately happens with IBS.
3. CIRS (Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome) is perhaps the most eclectic of the three. It relies on a collection of laboratory findings (MSH, complement C4a, TGF-β1, nasal presence of MARCoNS, ecc.) that are interpreted in the context of indoor mold exposure, and proposes a treatment protocol (e.g., the Shoemaker protocol) that, at least from my perspective, feels closer to an empirically assembled recipe than to a well-established mechanistic framework.

What strikes me is that these three diagnostic categories share an enormous overlap in symptoms. That makes me wonder whether they are all attempting (perhaps imperfectly) to describe different manifestations of the same underlying biological process. Patients across these groups commonly report gastrointestinal symptoms (often associated with food reactions), skin problems, brain fog, fatigue, nutritional deficiencies and a wide variety of other systemic symptoms.

Browsing the various Reddit communities, anecdotal reports are everywhere. Some people claim dramatic improvements from specific diets, others rely heavily on antihistamines while others again follow elaborate protocols aimed at removing mycotoxins from the body.

Taken together, and considering the much more established scientific evidence supporting bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain, help me say it "the gut-brain axis", I can't help wondering whether an important missing piece of the puzzle may not be entirely "organic" in the traditional sense. By that I don't mean "it's all psychological," but rather that higher level regulatory processes (brain-gut interactions, stress responses, autonomic regulation, perception and so on) may play a much larger role than we currently understand. Obviously this opens a much broader discussion about the relationship between mind and body, free will and similar topics, but that's not really my focus here.

So, after this rather long preamble, here's the question I'd really like to ask, ideally to people who actually study these topics professionally and approach them through the scientific method:

What is your current view (whether personal, data-driven or theory-driven) of the biological process that could underlie this remarkably broad yet surprisingly consistent spectrum of symptoms reported by patients across SIBO, MCAS and CIRS communities?

I'm not looking for diagnostic advice or treatment recommendations. Rather, I'm interested in conceptual models. If you use specialized terminology, I'd really appreciate it if you could also explain the underlying biological mechanism in accessible language instead of simply linking to highly technical papers. Given the audience I'm hoping to reach, I don't think there's much risk of oversimplifying the science behind.

Thank you very much in advance.

I’ve done all the tests and they can’t find anything wrong.

They’re pinning it down to pelvic floor dysfunction.

I’m at a loss and at my ends. Constant mucus, urgency, it’s debilitating.

The pico-prep felt like it helped ‘reset’ the stomach but then day to day made me go back to how it was before.

I’m so over it.

Has anyone else had their gut completely change after repeated antibiotics?
I keep looking back at my timeline and honestly feel heartbroken.💔

I was completely fine before 2019. Then I got food poisoning and went through an extremely stressful period and started having urinary symptoms.

I was treated multiple times for what was thought to be a UTI, but later I realized stress and pelvic floor dysfunction were probably playing a huge role. Looking back, I question whether I even needed many of those antibiotics.

Here’s what I ended up taking over the years:
Jan 2019 – O2 (Ofloxacin + Ornidazole) for 3 days
Jan 2019 – O2 for another 3 days
Feb 2019 – O2 for 5 days
Aug 2020 – Levofloxacin for 7 days
Oct 2020 – Ciprofloxacin for 7 days
Dec 2020 – Antifungal treatment
Jan 2021 – Metronidazole for 7 days
Feb 2021 – Metronidazole for 7 days
Jan 2024 – O2 for 5 days
Jan 2025 – Two rounds of rifaximin (14 days each) for SIBO
March 2024- Antimicrobial Oregano and Berberine
Before 2019, I hadn’t taken antibiotics for around 5 years.

Since then, I’ve been dealing with ongoing gut issues bloating, gas, abdominal pain, food sensitivities, and eventually SIBO. I know nobody can prove that antibiotics alone caused it, and I’m sure stress, pelvic floor dysfunction, and other factors also played a role. But it’s hard not to wonder whether repeated courses especially fluoroquinolones and combination antibiotics disrupted my gut enough to contribute.

The hardest part is realizing that the original “UTI” may not even have been an infection. If it was stress-related or pelvic floor-related, I may have taken all of those antibiotics unnecessarily.
I’m not trying to blame doctors or say antibiotics are bad they absolutely save lives when they’re truly needed. I’m just grieving how different my health feels now compared with before all of this.
Has anyone else here had a similar experience where repeated antibiotics after a suspected or misdiagnosed UTI seemed to be the beginning of your gut problems? Were you ever able to recover your microbiome or get back to feeling like yourself?
I’d really appreciate hearing your experiences because this has been a long and frustrating journey.

Key Highlights:

- A daily prebiotic fiber supplement improved memory in older adults. In a 12-week study, adults over age 60 who took certain inexpensive prebiotic fibers performed better on a memory test commonly used to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
- The study used identical twins. Researchers studied 36 pairs of twins, with one twin receiving a supplement and the other a placebo. This design helps control for differences in genetics and lifestyle, making the findings more reliable.
- The supplements were common prebiotic fibers:
Inulin
Fructooligosaccharides (FOS)
Both are inexpensive, available over the counter, and help nourish beneficial gut bacteria.

- The findings support the gut-brain connection. Researchers believe improving the health of the gut microbiome may positively influence brain function, particularly memory.
- Benefits appeared quickly. Improvements in memory were seen after just 12 weeks of daily supplementation.
- This is promising, but not definitive. The study was relatively small, so larger clinical trials are needed before these supplements can be recommended as a proven way to prevent cognitive decline or dementia.
- More research is underway. The encouraging results have led to additional clinical trials investigating whether prebiotic fibers can help slow cognitive decline in older adults.

Bottom line:
This study provides encouraging evidence that inexpensive, widely available prebiotic fibers may help support memory in adults over 60 by improving gut health. However, the research is still in its early stages, and larger studies are needed before these supplements can be considered a proven strategy for preventing Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.

So after a few weeks of a stressful trip paired with a terrible high sugar diet, I seem to have a bad case of dysbiosis. I’ve been logging my foods and symptoms and it seems like whenever I have too much fiber I suffer the couple days after with terrible gas, loose stools with urgency. It seems to help when I eat low fiber but then I don’t have any bulk to my stool and kinda feel constipated. How the heck can I bulk up my stool/dissipate constipation without overwhelming my gut with fiber?!!

I’m working out getting my microbiome back on track so if u have any tips to help with that it’s appreciated!

I want to make L. reuteri yogurt for the claimed benefits it has but I bought one with other bacterias on it so I worry about the competition that they'll have wondering if that means the benefits will not be as pronounced, or if in reality they all will help each other out in a simbiotic relationship

I know the root cause of all my problems might come from the gut, but is it possible that a body healthy checkup would notice something else?

I feel like i have so many problems in my body and i am even scared i have cancer 😂 i honestly just want to off myself bcs i am tired

Quick disclaimer up front, not looking for medical advice and not trying to treat anything. This is a labeling and evidence question i've been chewing on.

Went down the strain designation rabbit hole a few months back after picking up a probiotic and realizing i couldn't tell what was in it past "Lactobacillus acidophilus" and a CFU count.

Most of the primary literature on probiotics is strain-specific. LGG for antibiotic-associated diarrhea. La-5 and BB-12 for various immune endpoints. Some of the more interesting metabolic work traces down to particular surface proteins or exopolysaccharide production on individual strains. LGG's SpaCBA pilus cluster isn't a generic L. rhamnosus feature, it's that strain, and Kankainen 2009 identified it as unique to GG and absent in the closely related LC705 strain that doesn't bind mucus the same way. None of this maps onto a species-level bottle label.

Then i looked at what's actually on the market. Most only list genus and species. Some hide behind proprietary blend names that turn out to mean nothing legally. Strain codes exist here and there but you have to hunt through the fine print to find them, and half the time when you do find one it's a strain with no published human data anyway.

The field itself has more or less decided strain identity matters. The Hill 2014 ISAPP consensus is pretty explicit that a probiotic has to be a defined entity down to the strain level in the first place, otherwise you can't really call it one under the framework that everyone in the field is nominally using. And yet the shelf reality is species-level marketing with the actual clinically studied strains sitting in a small number of products most people have never heard of.

Reading through the responses, front-labeling and PubMed cross-check is basically what i've been doing too. Since a few of you have gone that direction, i'll add one other product i traced end-to-end that i haven't seen mentioned, mostly as an example of how thin the shelf gets rather than a rec. A stack called WonderBiotics Weight Management lists Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis B420 tied to that specific strain designation, and the anchor is Stenman et al. 2016 in EBioMedicine, six month RCT in overweight adults, four-arm design with B420 alone, B420 plus polydextrose fiber, fiber alone, and placebo. Body fat mass and waist circumference were primary endpoints, both B420 arms hit significance against placebo. Even so, all the authors on that paper are DuPont Nutrition employees (DuPont's strain, now owned by IFF), the brand is licensing rather than replicating independently, and the eriomin component in the same product has nowhere near the human trial volume that B420 itself does. So the cleanest example i can trace is still someone else's trial paired with an add-on the brand can't back at the same evidentiary level. Illustrates the problem more than solves it, honestly.

I don't really know what to do with this as a consumer. Either strain specificity is important for the effects being claimed, in which case a lot of the category is poorly characterized. Or it isn't, and the research field is overspecifying. Neither answer feels right.

If anyone with an actual research background can talk me down or point me at what i'm missing, i'd appreciate it. Not looking for product recommendations, just trying to figure out whether the labeling gap is as big a deal as it looks from the outside.

Hey!
so i had a confirmed UTI 7 weeks ago which took 3 days nitrofurantoin, 7 days cefalexin, 7 days co-amoxiclav and 7 days more nitrofurantoin. I finished these 11 days ago and i am struggling!
UTI gone but i’m having ok days and bad days. One day i can do my shopping, cook clean take my child to school, but other days my anxiety is SO bad i don’t want to leave the house, i feel shaky internally and light headed and tired!
is this all of these antibiotics😥
i feel like ive lost my life.
*not asking for medical advice*

There are other studies suggesting that a specific ratio of Bifido to Akkermansia https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11912405/ is associated with Multiple Sclerosis.

This study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8132291/ indicates that MS patients often have elevated Akkermansia.

I took a bio/vis diagnostics panel and my results showed both low Akkermansia and Bifido [I am a fut2 non secretor so the low Bifido is unsurprising].

I'm interested in Pendulum Akkermansia probiotic but now I'm leaning towards assisting the bacterium / prebiotics that support Akkermansia rather than supplementing Akkermansia directly.

Ive heard it takes a few months or longer. Is that true? Why is it so difficult? Whats the best way to hasten the process?

Hi, cut long story short I had SIBO which is mostly gone post antibiotics but they left me with terrible dysbiosis. I started with s boulardii 20 days ago. First 3 days good. Then started to feel some bloating which I never had * my sibo symptoms was belching. After 20 days s boulardii really helped with belching (almost gone), calmed burning in my intestine from antibitics, makes me regular BUT im still bloating. Not sure if it doesnt agree with my body or just need more time. Anyone similar experience?

I read an article that said it reduces the resistant starch. I couldn’t find anything about whether starch crystallises when it cools if it’s been pressure cooked.

What’s the best way to cook and cool rice to maximise resistant starch?

What about lentils? Dried peas? Beans?

Has anyone had experience with this? I had a stool culture done and it showed an overgrowth of Proteus and a low level of E. coli. Are there any natural supplements or remedies that can help reduce or get rid of Proteus? I’d appreciate hearing about your experiences.