Sorting Through the Hype to Choose an Effective Probiotic

Dear Reader,

If you read a newspaper, watch TV or even browse through a magazine or two, you’ve likely heard about probiotics. Probiotics refers to “good” bacteria that contribute to the health and balance of the intestinal tract. They are deemed “good” or “friendly” because they help create a healthy environment in your gut.

Specifically, probiotics are known to help digest the fiber in your diet so you can better absorb the nutrients from your food, protect against “bad” bacteria and strengthen the intestinal wall to help reduce the amount of toxins that pass into your bloodstream.

Good stuff, right? Which is precisely why so many food companies and supplement makers have jumped on the probiotic bandwagon over the past few years. It seems like everywhere you turn, someone is talking about how this yogurt or that pill is the “best” one to take. At best, it leaves you confused and wondering if this is hype or hope for your health.

My name is Dr. Michael Cutler, Contributing Editor to Whole Health Insider, your trusted source for comprehensive natural health and lifestyle information. I have been an eyewitness to remarkable changes in health using natural medicines, alternative therapies and the power of mind and body health.

Today, I am here to help you understand why you need an effective probiotic and how to choose the right one for you.

ABOUT DR. MICHAEL CUTLER

Dr. Michael Cutler is a graduate of Brigham Young University, Tulane Medical School and Natividad Medical Center Family Practice Residency in Salinas, CA. In addition to being a Contributing Editor to Whole Health Insider, he is a board-certified family physician with more than 20 years experience, specializing in alternative health remedies. His mission is to share his time-tested natural healing solutions to help you experience optimal health.

Probiotics Fight Digestive Problems

As you age, your GI tract changes and the balance of good and bad bacteria is often disrupted, with probiotic levels dropping in comparison to bad bacteria. In turn, a myriad of healthy functions are disrupted, including a rise in the incidence of digestive issues.

Specifically, as you age, your body’s digestive capabilities change in two big ways. First, your immune system becomes compromised. Second, food doesn’t move as smoothly/routinely through your stomach and intestines.

These two changes are closely connected to unhealthy shifts in the mix of good and bad bacteria in your digestive tract. This is often caused by a drop in the overall level of probiotics residing in your intestines, as well as a reduction in the diversity of these helpful bacteria.

The result is a weakening of the intestinal wall, which may contribute to intestinal absorption issues, low levels of various vitamins and difficulty absorbing protein.

Replenishing probiotics in your digestive system and ensuring a healthy bacterial balance in your gut is an important way to protect against opportunistic organisms, promote the intestinal health and improve digestion.^1-2

Beyond Digestion

Believe it or not, your digestive tract is a critical part of your immune system. Your immune system is composed of two parts. The first—the innate/non-specific immune system—provides immediate, overall protection against physical, chemical and biological intruders.

The second—the adaptive system—takes more time to figure out the best way to protect your body. It is made up of organisms such as B cells and T cells that become familiar with foreign invaders, mounting a swift response and attacking in a targeted manner.

Because the digestive system takes in material from outside the body—namely, food and drink—you are ripe for an immune attack. However, both the innate and adaptive immune systems are active in the gut, ensuring that your body has ample protection.

Fighting the Bad with the Good

Given this bastion inside us, how is it that millions of Americans suffer from poor health? In many cases, the answer may be an imbalance of good versus bad bacteria.

Many unhealthy lifestyle choices and certain prescription medications can kill off beneficial bacteria. These include a sugar-laden diet, chronic stress, birth control pills and antibiotics.

Eating a diet high in sugar and refined carbs also throws off the delicate balance of bacteria in your intestines. The key reason is that a diet loaded with rapidly digested sugars/starches promotes inflammation.³ The typical American diet is heavy on carbohydrates, with roughly two-thirds coming from inflammation-promoting, high-glycemic foods such as bread, soft drinks, cakes, cookies, doughnuts, potatoes, cereal and pasta.⁴

By eliminating (or reducing) these inflammatory foods from your diet, you will likely notice positive changes in your digestive health pretty quickly. You can then replenish the lost probiotics to help restore the good bacteria.

The Problem with Probiotics in Foods

I’ve had many patients ask me why they cannot simply get these beneficial probiotics from certain foods. Here’s my concern with food-based probiotics:

Foods that contain probiotics—yogurt, sour cream, kefir, sauerkraut, kombucha (fermented) tea and fermented soy (miso, tempeh)—generally contain one or two strains of beneficial bacteria. If you want multiple species and strains, you’re not likely to find them in these foods. Plus, more often than not, the food does not provide a clinically relevant dose of the strain(s) it does contain.

Additionally, the active cultures aren’t very effective due to these foods being heat treated during the manufacturing process and/or sitting on store shelves for too long. Plus, any package, processed or otherwise pre-made food that contains probiotics often includes unhealthy ingredients such as sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavors. This is particularly true when it comes to yogurt and kefir.

Confusion with Probiotic Supplements

Now that you see why probiotics are so important for digestive and overall health—and that a food-based product simply won’t cut it—you can see why I prefer patients take a probiotic supplement. This, of course, then raises the question of which probiotic supplement to choose.

Unfortunately, the confusion seems to simply continue. First, there’s the issue of one strain or multi-strains. This then leads to which strain or strains are best. And when you consider the vast number of choices when it comes to probiotics, you’ll understand why.

In a normal healthy adult, there are more than 400 different strains of probiotics present in your digestive tract at any given time. Several of the most common include:

•	Bifidobacterium animalis
•	Bifidobacterium breve
•	Bifidobacterium bifidum
•	Bifidobacterium infantis
•	Bifidobacterium lactis
•	Bifidobacterium longum
•	Lactobacillus acidophilus
•	Lactobacillus bulgaricus
•	Lactobacillus casei
•	Lactobacillus delbrueckii
•	Lactobacillus plantarum
•	Lactobacillus reuteri
•	Lactobacillus rhamnosus
•	Lactobacillus salivarius
•	Propionibacteria

More than likely, Bifidobacterium bifidum and Lactobacillus acidophilus look familiar, but maybe not the others. That’s because a number of the probiotic species listed above are actually sub-strains that have been studied for their effectiveness.

While this is all great, it does raise yet another question: Which one of these strains should I take, or should I be using several strains, and if so, which of those do I need? Great question!

Single-Strain Versus Multi-Strain Probiotics

When you have too little of certain probiotic species and too low a probiotic level overall in your intestines, the likelihood of digestive upset increases. To offset this, you can boost overall probiotic levels, as well as the diversity of probiotic species and strains through dietary supplements.

To this point, several studies have shown that probiotics, in different combinations of different species for different durations and at different dosage levels, have been shown to be effective in improving digestive symptoms. That's why I recommend using a multi-strain probiotic daily.

Finding the Right Mix

Now that you understand why a multi-strain probiotic is your best bet, the next issue is which of the myriad of strains out there should you be using? I believe that there are seven strains in particular that provide great overall protection and support.

These include:

•	*Bifobacterium breve*—Colonizes in the GI tract and helps reduce the pH of the colon, which can reduce bowel transit time; helps reduce bloating, alleviate occasional constipation and promote more comfortable bowels.
•	*Bifobacterium lactis—Highly tolerant to acidic environments and to bile salts, B. lactis* is among the most prominent species found in the digestive tract of breast-fed infants, and offers immune support.
•	*Bifobacterium longum*—By keeping the pH balance of your digestive tract hostile to bad bacteria, these probiotics promote healthy intestinal flora.
•	*Lactobacillus acidophilus*—Boosts your immune system and helps protect you from yeast and bacterial imbalances.
•	*Lactobacillus casei*—Promotes healthy digestion, reduces lactose (dairy) intolerance, relieves occasional constipation and helps eliminate embarrassing gas.
•	*Lactobacillus plantarum*—Helps alleviate occasional constipation, reduces bloating and promotes comfortable bowels.
•	*Lactobacillus salivarius*—Helps eliminate bad bacteria and protects the gastrointestinal tract lining.

Delivery System Matters

The last piece of the probiotic puzzle comes down to delivery system. Probiotics are quite fragile. In fact, many probiotic supplements fail to deliver live flora to your digestive tract—even if they promise billions and billions of bacteria—because most of the bacteria die due to exposure to air, heat and light.

And then there’s the issue of potency. See, it is inevitable that a certain percentage of probiotics will be destroyed by gastric acids. Unfortunately, probiotic supplements contained in an encapsulated powder offer very little or no positive benefits. Even inside the capsules, the probiotics are constantly exposed to air, which quickly kills most—if not all—of the living bacteria before you ever take the first capsule.

Therefore, you’ll want a product that is protected from heat, moisture and light. And to preserve potency, your supplement should prevent stomach acids from killing the bacteria on contact. This combination is your best bet for getting the right kinds of probiotics to your body in the greatest numbers possible.

Choosing the Most Effective Probiotic

Pretty tall order, right? Find a probiotic that is not only multi-strain, but contains the right mix of probiotic strains and has a delivery system that protects against stomach acid.

When I gave this advice to my patients, many of them threw their hands up in frustration. Turns out, no such product existed. There were many that met some of these criteria, but no one product that provided all of my recommendations.

Fortunately, I am in a great position to solve this very problem…and I did.

In addition to my role as a Contributing Editor to Whole Health Insider, I am also an advisor for a natural supplement company called True Health™. And with my research and development team behind me, we set out to create this exact blend of probiotic with the best delivery system possible.

When we created Ultimate Probiotic Solution™, we included all seven of the probiotic strains I listed above. While each one brings a specific and critical benefit to the table, the real star is a specific form of Bifobacterium longum known as BB536®.

BB536® is Japan’s top-selling probiotic—and for good reason. It is one of the most researched strains, supported by more than 40 published human clinical studies in populations including infants, pregnant women and the elderly. Studies show that this specific strain of B. longum improves intestinal microflora and improves stool frequency, as well as softening the stool and reducing stool odor. In fact, one study found that participants who took BB536® enjoyed a 48 percent improvement in bowel frequency in just 10 days. Plus, BB536® has the added benefits of supporting a strong immune system.

And when it comes to ensuring the best delivery system we could, Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ combines a combination of unique packaging with DRcaps® ground-breaking, delayed-release technology.

DRcaps® are acid resistant and ensure the beneficial bacteria in Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ gets past stomach acid unharmed. These innovative, vegetarian, delayed-release capsules start breaking down after approximately 50 minutes—compared to just five minutes for a typical immediate-release capsule. The result? The capsules release the probiotics in the small intestine, where they are needed, versus the stomach, where they would be subjected to gastric acids.

We then package these capsules with aluminum blister carding to provide a maximum barrier to light and moisture.

In other words, you get the greatest number of probiotics, in one of the best blends around. Period.

Here’s What You Get in Every Capsule…

Odds are, if you're taking any other probiotic, you are not getting very much of it at all. With Ultimate Probiotic Solution™, you can be sure you are getting one of the highest-quality, purest formulas on the market today.

Every capsule includes:

•	Bifobacterium breve
•	Bifobacterium lactis
•	Bifobacterium longum (as BB536®)
•	Lactobacillus acidophilus
•	Lactobacillus casei
•	Lactobacillus plantarum
•	Lactobacillus salivarius
•	Individual foil packaging
•	DRcaps® delayed-released technology
•	Aluminum blister carding to protect against light and moisture
•	No artificial preservatives
•	No artificial colors or flavors
•	No salt, soy, corn, wheat, gluten, eggs, dairy or yeast
•	Vegetarian capsules
•	Made in the USA

Our Unconditional Guarantee

At True Health™, your satisfaction with our health products is our first priority. Our advanced, research-based supplement formulas use only the finest raw materials, are manufactured with processes that comply with the Dietary Supplement Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and undergo extensive internal and independent quality testing for purity and potency.

But that’s not all…

We guarantee results! If you’re not thrilled with the health improvements you gain from any True Health™ product, simply return the unused portion—AT ANY TIME—for a full refund of the product price.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a LIFETIME satisfaction guarantee like ours anywhere else in the supplement industry! In fact, most are limited to just 30 or 60 days. But nutritional supplements work differently for different people, and the time YOU need to experience the full health benefits of a particular formula is unique. So please, take your time and rest assured that your purchase is ALWAYS risk-free and your satisfaction is ALWAYS 100 percent guaranteed.

"Since I have been taking Ultimate Probiotic Solution™, I have less gas when I eat foods that normally give me gas. I also am more regular. And other bowel symptoms have generally improved. I plan on ordering more Ultimate Probiotic Solution™."
—H.M., Anderson, CA

"I take Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ from True Health™, and it has made a big difference for me. It has helped my bowel symptoms when other products didn't. In fact, one time I tried a different probiotic product and it didn't do anything."
—L.P., East Haven, CT

"I like the new Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ formula. I think it is even more explicit in addressing digestive issues (than the previous formula). Since I have been taking it over the last two weeks, I am more regular and feel less 'gassed up' than ever."
—E.W., Gilmore City, IA

Individual results may vary.

Order Today – Limited-Time Special Offer

Your gastrointestinal system is chock full of bacteria (both good and bad) that either assist or inhibit your ability to digest and metabolize food. Healthy digestion occurs when these two types of bacteria are in balance, as the good bacteria—probiotics—help your body fight off the bad ones.

When it comes to choosing the very best probiotic for your health, I have no doubt that Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ is the best choice, bar none.

I feel this confident because I know that every capsule of Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ helps to:

•	Reduce embarrassing gas and bloating
•	Ease everyday constipation
•	Improve immune health
•	Enhance microflora balance
•	Improve overall digestion
•	Reduce bowel irritation and abdominal discomfort

Best of all, Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ contains the world-renowned BB536® strain of B. longum. That’s why I am such a staunch advocate for Ultimate Probiotic Solution™—and I think you will be too!

Order Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ for as low as $19.95 per box and FREE SHIPPING!

Sincerely,

Michael Cutler, MD
Board-Certified Family Physician
True Health™ Nutritional Supplement Advisor
Contributing Editor, Whole Health Insider

P.S. I personally guarantee that Ultimate Probiotic Solution™ is a much more effective probiotic than the brand you may already be taking. It will get you results – or it’s FREE!

References:

1.	Tewari SN and Wilson AK. 1973;210:820-3.
2.	FAO/WHO. Health and Nutritional Properties of Probiotics in Food including Powder Milk with Live Lactic Acid Bacteria. Report of a Joint FAO/WHO Expert Consultation on Evaluation of Health and Nutritional Properties of Probiotics in Food Including Powder Milk with Live Lactic Acid Bacteria; 2001.
3.	Liu S, et al. Am J Clin Nutr 2002, 75:492-8.
4.	Subar AF, et al. J Am Diet Assoc 1998, 98:537-47.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

To order by phone please call: 1-800-746-4513
To receive this special web-only offer, please reference savings code: TEP1J449