My doctor recommended I take a probiotic after a round of antibiotics that is 100 million CFU whereas many yogurts advertise billions of CFU. Why is that the case?
In: Biology
Once you are in the millions of CFU per serving it kind of doesn’t matter. At that point regular consumption and other dietary factors probably have a better influence on if your gut flora changes.
If it’s supplement or food, neither claims about flora concentration are evaluated by FDA. They both contain lots of live culture and it’s doubtful to be anymore accurate than that without far more extensive control.
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A serving of yogurt is many times larger than your average probiotic pill. The average probiotic pill only generally has a couple milligrams or less of active ingredient, whereas a yogurt will weigh something like 150 g. So even if only 0.001% of it is CFUs, that will still be more than the pills. Plus, as another answer noted, these claims are not likely to be closely regulated.
Also, there isn’t any particular reason why the pills *should* have more CFUs than yogurt.
It generally doesn’t matter how many millions or billions of bacteria there are in a pill or yogurt. Most important are the different strains of bacteria. Better pro and pre biotics advertise the amountof strains or cultures. Which allows your gut to recover faster.
For example if you have a billion bacteria with 1 culture, it’s not very effective for a good gut health balance. But a million bacteria with 8, 15, 20 cultures is more effective than one with more.
The bacteria count does help with the spreading of the bacteria, but it’s not as much important when there are millions or billions of them.
You eat a cup of yoghurt and a teaspoon of supplement. The supplements are not 100% bacteria they are a growing medium that has reached saturation, just like yoghurt. The only difference is they are dried and put in capsules or pressed into pills.
Like with all things that experience exponential growth until they hit a limit. (yeast, viruses, bacteria, mold, dandelions in your yard) The initial amount doesn’t really matter as long as it’s large enough for a population to survive.
Understand there’s at least 27 different strains of bacteria that are good for your gut.
Yogurt has a few. Soil based probiotics have the most.
Comparing simple numbers is not the entire story.
Ummm, the measurements I’ve seen that seem to make more sense in effectiveness terms were the number & variety of CFUs that survive the digestive process & exit the digestion system.
It was a scholarly article (but not a peer reviewed paper) as I recall – the scientist in question tried various different probiotic foods & pills & measured the results by studying her poop. If I find the link I’ll add it in an edit.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-fermented-foods/
First, FDA is not obligated to evaluate the claims of most supplements like probiotics. Maybe your doctor thinks a minimum amount would be a better base for gut health especially after antibiotics. There’s nothing wrong with either, just yogurt as it is is proven as a healthy probiotic considering the production process.
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