Chris: Justin, I just noticed your hand is up. Sorry, I was in the wrong screen, so I didn’t see that, but be happy to have you come on and say hello and ask a question.
Hey, Justin. I think you might still be on mute. Let’s see if we can—
Justin: How’s it going, Chris?
Chris: There you are. Great. How are you?
Justin: Sorry about that.
Chris: No worries.
Justin: So, I have a question. A couple of weeks ago when we were doing the module, I was wondering if you have any products that you use personally or recommend to help optimize ideal composition for probiotics and probiotics. I believe on one of the chats that you were talking about Seed and Terraflora, but I wasn’t sure there was another broader answer to that question.
Chris: Yes, yes. Thanks for the question. I like Seed it a lot. It’s a relatively new company and product. I know the founders, and I actually have just became a board advisor, an advisor for the company, because I believe in what they’re doing and I want to help them succeed. Part of the issue with probiotics … like many other supplements, there’s both an upside and a downside to lack of regulation. The upside is Big Pharma has not been able to take control and put a chokehold on the development of new products and get up to all the shenanigans that they get up to. The downside is that, really, anyone can release any product, and in many cases the products don’t even have what they say they have in them or a lot of third-party reports of probiotics by groups like ConsumerLab have found that they don’t have even one-tenth of the number of organisms that they say they do, and even if they do there’s always been this question of how do you get live organisms through to the colon when our entire physiology is basically designed to prevent that from happening.
The approach thus far has been more I would describe the brute-force approach, like, we’ll use super-high-potency probiotic formulations like five hundred billion organisms, and then we’ll assume that 90 percent or more of those are going to die in the stomach and the small intestine, and then maybe that 5 percent gets through and so has the therapeutic effect. I think if you look at the research, it’s pretty clear that that was true that these probiotics, particularly the well-researched ones like VSL#3, they’re having a clear impact in studies. They’re helping people with even more serious conditions like IBD. I’m not saying that those probiotics were worthless by any stretch, but it does make sense to try to find a delivery mechanism that is more effective.
And so, I think Seed has cracked that nut, and one of the interesting things we’ve seen in using it with patients is that a lot of people who aren’t able to tolerate probiotics before are able to tolerate Seed pretty well. I don’t know why for sure, but my theory is that because it’s protected and it’s not releasing bacteria in the small intestine, if somebody has SIBO, for example, you could see why taking a product that releases bacteria in the small intestine is probably not a good idea. But in this case, it’s surviving intact and it’s getting all the way to the colon without releasing the organisms. And then, along the same lines, people who previously hadn’t really benefited much from probiotics sometimes see a real difference with Seed. It’s not a panacea, and we definitely have had people who don’t respond at all to it or who can’t tolerate it, but that number is much smaller than other probiotics that we use.
Terraflora is very similar to MegaSporeBiotic. I think they each have four species, and three of them are the same in each product and then one is different. One of the main differences is that Terraflora can be ordered by consumers, whereas MegaSporeBiotic only sells to practitioners, so that’s just like a practical logistical difference. Actually, we have used MegaSporeBiotic for years and really had great results with it especially as part of a … it has a pretty strong antimicrobial effect, I think. We think of it in some ways almost like an antibiotic in addition to being a probiotic that’s got those Bacillus species, and so I would say that Terraflora is probably similar.
But the advantage that both of these products have in terms of what we were just talking about is that they are soil-based organisms and they’re spore farmers, so they survive the passage through the stomach and the intestine, they’re adapted to doing that, they have been doing that for probably hundreds of millions of years, so you don’t have to worry about viability with those products as much either. I’ve also seen that a lot of people who can’t tolerate the lactic acid-style probiotics like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria even with Seed can tolerate Terraflora or MegaSporeBiotic. I think depending on the patient, we typically at this point recommend Seed, just a maintenance probiotic for someone who wants to do that.
A couple other things I didn’t mention about it, all of the strains are evidence based. They’re all very well researched and chosen, and it’s not just like Lactobacillus plantarum, they have a particular strain, sometimes patented strains, that all have double-blind peer-reviewed studies behind them. That’s pretty unusual on a probiotic, and then it does have a prebiotic as well, so really, it’s a synbiotic, and that’s true for Terraflora too. I think most products that are coming out now are synbiotics because there is a recognition that it’s not just about the probiotic, live organisms, you’ve got to provide feed food for the beneficial bacteria. That’s where I’m at right now with it and will definitely update you if it changes. There have been some definitely some supply issues with Seed.
Justin: Yes. I saw that. I tried to grab some online and it said it wasn’t going to be available.
Chris: Unfortunately, I have probably some responsibility there. As soon as I started to get the word out, their capacity was not ramped up enough to deal with the demand. But I know what’s happening from talking with Raja, who’s the medical scientific director. Basically, they’re switching to a new encapsulation technology. It’s going to be more robust, and they’re still in that process, and so they have run out mostly of the older stuff and the new one is not fully ramped up yet. Once that happens, there won’t be any supply issues, so don’t quote me on this, but I’m hearing within a few weeks that should be resolved.