Chris Kresser: I have a whole slide on this in the probiotic and prebiotic presentation, which, I believe, is coming up. Is that next week, AJ? I’m not sure. If someone has the delivery schedule in front of them, they might be able to tell. So I’m not going to go into great detail on this because you’ll be hearing about it really soon, but it boils down to a misunderstanding about the difference between spore-forming microorganisms and endospore formers. The organisms that are in Prescript-Assist are endospore formers, but they’re biologically inactive, and they remain that way until the environmental conditions allow them to resume their normal form, and that happens in the soil, not in our gut. They simply pass out of the system if they form in the gut of any mammal, and the Relman-Stanford group studies, which have used advanced DNA PCR analysis to sequence the microbiome, have shown that soil-based organisms are more numerous in the gut than lactic acid microflora and that the microflora that are resident in the healthy mucosa of the gut differ considerably from what’s present in fecal material, which tends to have higher numbers of lactobacilli and bifidobacteria.
I know some people like Jini Patel Thompson and others have been really vocal opponents of soil-based organisms, but I looked into this in great detail, and all I saw was research that supported their use. Prescript-Assist microflora are recognized as Class 1 etiological agents. They’ve had more than a decade of use as a supplement with no adverse effects or side effects even in the reported studies, and the initial studies or demonstrations that were done on animals with repeated consumptions of doses more than 500 times those that are recommended for clinical use had no ill effects, so I feel pretty confident in recommending Prescript-Assist.