Do you have a preferred pre/probiotic that you recommend?

My favorite probiotic right now is ​Seed Daily Synbiotic​. We have our patients self-order that one online, and Seed has about 24 different bacteria in there. It also has some prebiotic in there. I’ve found that most patients tolerate it incredibly well. [It’s] one of the better ones that I’ve found for people, and I also love the company because they set you up with a subscription, [and] they send your supply of probiotic every month. It’s just sort of, like, an automatic thing that they’ll ship to you. You can, of course, modify your subscription if you need. They use really environmentally friendly packaging, so you can compost or recycle all the packaging. They give you a jar initially, but then just send you, like, a refill with pretty minimal waste. I think they’re just an awesome company all around. Great probiotic.

In terms of prebiotic, again, you wouldn’t want to use this in the setting of SIBO, but I’m just kind of going for, like, maintenance gut health or ramping things up after we’ve done the antimicrobials, my favorite is just [to] have people use food. Get a lot of plant sources, but otherwise, if I’m wanting to use supplemental probiotic, I don’t feel strongly about one or the other. I like partially hydrolyzed guar gum or ​Sunfiber​, that one; there are some nice studies around that, so I have used that one quite a bit. I’ll just have sometimes, like, people make chia seed pudding, [and] throw some acacia fiber powder in there. I do like the acacia fiber powder, but I try to just get them eating a lot of vegetables and plant foods and taking care [of] prebiotics that way. It also saves you a little money on buying one more supplement.