Eli5: if Lactic acid bacteria are good for health, why can’t they create a permanent colony and settle in our body?
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They do, lactobacillus is one of the most common “good” bacteria in the gut microbiome. The whole probiotic market is a giant scam. Lactobacillus is one of the most common, and one of the easiest to grow. It’s also found in tons of food products naturally so there’s no reason to take supplements. Many research studies have shown that while the bacterial microbiome can be reduced with heavy duty antibiotic use, it reestablishes itself on its own within a few days of stopping antibiotics.
A healthy gut microbiome requires a diversity of bacteria, but all of these probiotics only provide one or maybe two different species so they are useless. But, technically having the bacteria is good for you, so it’s very easy for manufacturers to falsely equate that with meaning that you need to take supplements which allows them to turn a profit.
I don’t know specifically about those pacterias, but this is a pattern happening in all living things. there are no such thing as good or bad bacterias. That’s just an oversimplification. Our antibodies are good bacteria-like organisms… until they start targeting ourselves in what is called auto-immune diseases. Bacterias beneficial in one organ can kill us in another organ, trying to do the same thing. Even if that bacteria isn’t hurting us outside of the organ it thrives in, it’ll get out-competed for food elsewhere in our body.
In fact, many beneficial bacterias (like probiotics in yogourt) have to be taken regularly to have any efect because they starve really quickly in our gut, with the resident bacterias winning the race for feeding. It might be a bad example, as probiotics have been proven to have no more than a placebo effect, but hopefully it’s good for illustrating the problem.
Then, there’s the offals problem. Bacterias eating lactic acid will “deffecate” another byproduct. That byproduct might actually make the environment tocxic, or alert antibodies of an intruder. they could starve quickly once out of lactic acid to eat.
The list of things that could explain why those specific bacterias cannot colonize our bodies is very long, because microbiology is incredibly complex, and isn’t as simple as whether some bacterias are good or bad. I strongly recommend reading the book “I Contain Multitudes” by ed young. short, well explained in layman terms.
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