Hello there and welcome to the nutrition diva podcast. I'm your host

Monica Reinagle and today we're talking about probiotic supplements and when it makes sense to take them

Long time listener Mahin sent a great question recently. They wrote I started taking probiotic supplements after having a few

rounds of antibiotics and the negative digestive effects they come with. I feel like

they've been beneficial for me over the past month.

Should I continue taking them?

Or should my gut be repopulated by now and able to sustain itself?

Probiotic supplements, of course, contain various strains of bacteria and other microbes that are thought to be beneficial to our health.

And we also talk a lot about the intestinal microbiome,

the bacteria that live in our gut

and the effects that they have on our health.

And I think there are some widespread misunderstandings

about the relationship between the two.

People tend to think about probiotic supplements,

the way we think of stocking a trout pond, where ingesting specific strains of bacteria in the hopes that they will set up

housekeeping in our guts. But that's not really how probiotic supplements work.

Most of the bacteria that we ingest in probiotic foods and supplements

do not actually colonize the gut in any permanent way. They are transient. Our particular

microbiome, our bacterial signature, if you will, is established early in life.

And the microbiome can be temporarily disrupted

by things like infection or antibiotics.

And probiotics can also have a short-term impact,

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