Hello there and welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinegel.

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

we're 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,

but they are unlikely to displace or significantly alter those resident populations.

As Professor Maria Marco of the University of California Davis explains,

the resident gut microbiota that develops during infancy tends to remain relatively stable throughout

adulthood. Even with perturbations caused by antibiotics or foodborne illness,

the gut microbiome tends to be resilient to the long-term establishment of exogenous bacterial

...