Probiotics survive stomach acid...yet another myth busted!

It's a bit alarming how much misinformation there is on the Internet about candida. It seems that some claims are copied from website to website with no regard to scientific accuracy. I had always assumed (due to excessive marketing it seems) that regular probiotics are ineffective without an enteric coating because they get killed off by the low pH acid in the stomach. And yet when I actually took the time to research this, it turns out that there really was no hard evidence to back this claim, and I've even found some recent studies disproving it entirely.

In one of the studies, the participants' fecal samples were tested negative for specific bacterial strains at the beginning of the study and then tested positive after they ate yogurt with those strains in it. This proved that those strains effectively survived the stomach acid and made it all the way through the small and large intestines.

The lesson - be skeptical about what you read on the Internet! Make sure there's solid evidence backing it up.


Probiotics: determinants of survival and growth in the gut

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/73/2/399s.short



Survival of Yogurt Bacteria in the Human Gut

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1489325/
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