Top 5 Probiotics: Top Gut Health Supplements Reviewed

Probiotic Microbes and Gut Health

Probiotics can influence various aspects of your health and well-being. Research scientists have only just started to identify the role that your gut bacteria play in your health.

Interest seemed to have started through experiments that investigated why obesity levels were increasing globally.

The agricultural situation globally is one of mass production including: mass fertiliser, herbicide, pesticide and antibiotic use. These factors are detrimental to natural soil microorganisms and your own internal gut microbiome.

Many scientists hypothesised a link between these two factors and we now know that they are definitely linked.

There was a lot of evidence to show the foods you eat influence your gut bacteria, your weight and vice versa.

For example, a fatty diet produces a completely different range of gut bacteria to a low fat diet.

One standout microbial study found that switching gut bacteria from one set of fatter animals to skinny ones transformed their body structures.

They stripped the pre-existing gut bacteria with pharmaceutical antibiotics and replaced the gut bacteria with those from lean animals. Basically, the fat animals went skinny. How cool is that! It was all because of their gut bacteria influencing their body weight.

Where weight loss effects weren’t seen, other beneficial health effects have been reported specifically with supplementation.

From these sorts of experiments, naturally, there was gathering interest in the healthy lifestyle community. People wanted to know how probiotics can maintain and encourage good health through introducing healthy gut bacteria, harnessing the power of nature.

There’s always been an underlying emphasis in the wellness community to embrace nature as much as possible.

A central idea of natural wellness is to harness nature for improving one’s wellbeing. Let’s delve into probiotics themselves a bit more to see how they could be of benefit to you.

What Are Probiotics?

Probiotics are supplements or foods that you eat which could help to encourage or maintain the growth of helpful gut bacteria vs harmful gut bacteria. By harmful micro-organisms we mean those that will have an overall negative impact on your wellbeing, whether that is physical or mental.

Probiotics are separate to prebiotics, in that prebiotics are the feedstuff for your gut microbes restoring diversity. Whereas probiotics are delivering the actual microorganisms to the gut.

There are many examples of traditional probiotic foods such as green leafy vegetables, yoghurt or kefir being standout examples containing positive micro-organisms.

Foods like spinach are abundant in naturally occurring microorganisms and kefir is one of the best probiotic foods there is. Kefir is specifically made to harness naturally occurring milk digesting bacteria.

While not only increasing access to nutrients such as phosphorus and calcium, kefir acts as a probiotic to load the gut with positive microorganisms too. We personally recommend most people eat kefir once a week to aid with overall wellness.

Kefir has been studied in relation to cancer prevention for its anti-inflammatory effects on the gut and GI tract. They say what goes around comes back around, in relation to stress signalling molecules and cancer, this is certainly the case with the GI tract.

To see a little more on stress and inflammation reduction check out our article here, we also have an article on cortisol reduction too.

Why Take a Probiotic?

Weight Loss and Nutrition

Probiotics could make a real impact to the digestion and absorption of critical nutrients from your food. These include Vitamin B12, a vitamin that only certain microbes can make and essential amino acids that are needed for muscle growth.

Your gut microbes are thought to positively influence efficiency of energy production, inflammation of the gut as well as obesity.

Gut microbes were seen to dramatically improve neural growth and overall brain wellness in animals, which could be linked to increases in certain nutrient levels.

It is known that certain microbial gut yeasts dramatically increase body weight. Inversely, probiotics are thought to positively influence these factors by adding extra good bacteria to the gut. Some probiotics have promoted weight loss in humans.

Brain Health and Probiotics

The microbiota in probiotic foods and supplements produce unique signature, fatty acids that are thought to communicate indirectly with the brain and receptors. While not exactly clear as to how it all functions in the body, it is an exciting thought.

Healthy gut microbes are thought to be a major influencing factor on mental health too because of the spectrum of molecules they interact with and produce. Gut bacteria have been shown to influence many hormone and basic cell signalling pathways, through corticosteroid and tryptophan induced changes, that can influence enormous aspects of your health.

If you want to read a bit more about tryptophan, serotonin and melatonin and their health effects, you can do so here.

Some studies suggest that probiotic microbes might play a role in a child’s development pre-pregnancy and development of the blood brain barrier too.

Gut Wellbeing, health and Immunity

Maintaining positive relationships with other organisms, such as these symbiotic gut microbe relationships, has good outcomes for survival and of course wellbeing too.

It is easy to see how we built such strong relationships with certain microbes. Gut microbes and probiotics might also be able to play a positive role in immune system functioning and allergy responses. Some studies have shown probiotics reduce intestinal infections.

The science suggests that we once produced vitamin C, similar to how cholesterol is made in the liver and delegated this to plants. This is because they were able to do that process with far less energetic cost.

Human relationships with cattle, their unique microbes and overall vitamin B12 production may have developed similarly to this over time. Microbes evolve minor changes a lot quicker and with far less detrimental effect than we can. It is really easy to see how these small-scale symbiotic relationships exploded with humans.

Top 5 Probiotics

Top probiotic manufacturers make all sorts of considerations when preparing a probiotic supplement. They work out the right capsule or tablet coating design to pass through the acidic stomach, which works to naturally kill pathogens.

They also work out the best strains of probiotic bacteria to use too. These considerations will clearly have the biggest impacts on your gut health.

We’ll now cover the Top 5 probiotics and how they can assist with your wellbeing.

Optibac Every Day: 90 Capsules

One of the world leading probiotic and prebiotic innovators is Optibac. They host a wide range of probiotic products, with the most popular being their Optibac probiotics everyday capsules probiotic formula.

Containing elite level strains of probiotics they are industry leading. Their research suggested that the best strains to use were different types of Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium and Lactococcus. These are naturally occurring bacterial strains that have been heavily researched for their probiotic benefits.

This product boasts 5 billion live cultures per serving or CFU. The CFU at the end is a unit of measurement. The CFU count just means how many individual cells of bacteria or yeasts there are in a probiotic supplement culture.

Seeing as there are live cultures in probiotic products, as best practice, we would recommend your products are kept refrigerated.

This Optibac product is award winning and has been heavily researched by the team at Optibac. The product contains a small number of proprietary prebiotic fibres that gut microbes are encouraged to feed from.

You can take one or two daily as recommended.

This product is marketed as gluten free, yeast free and vegetarian. There are no added sugars and the capsules themselves are made from just about next to most basic industry standard there is.

We really like this product. Optibac seems to have thought about the design in the depth that a probiotic needs to be. There is a potential for people to be wasting their money without effective product design and Optibac set that standard quite high.

Udo’s Choice Super 8-Hi-Potency Probiotic

Udo’s Choice is one of the original probiotic brands. They’ve also got multiple products including one digestive enzymes product that we have reviewed previously.

Udo’s Choice Super 8 Hi-Potency Probiotic is also an award-winning product and gives Optibac a massive run for its money. Udo’s Choice won a remedies digestion award in 2018 and a taste for life essentials award in 2018.

This product boasts 42 billion CFU on manufacture, mostly being cutting edge probiotic strains of Lactobacilli. The CFU count has also been independently tested. This product was developed with your gut in mind, specifically to reduce yeasts and harmful bacteria in the GI tract.

There are a total of 8 live human native-strains of bacteria in the product, selected for high gut colonization. They emphasize strains such as Bifidobacteria that make those short chain fatty acids we mentioned earlier. Aswell as the other Lactobacilli strains, that encourage normal energy production and digestion.

Again, it is nice to know one has put their money in good hands. There isn’t a guideline amount, just that one to two capsules a day are recommended.

This product one hundred percent needs to be refrigerated and lasts about one month in total. The product costs about 25 dollars for a 30 capsule bottle.

One again as this is a capsule based product, there are minimal added coatings. We would say this also pretty much close to the basic type of capsule, with minimal additional ingredients.

Ancient Nutrition SBO Probiotics Gut Restore

Ancient Nutrition are established and upcomers in the supplements market. One of their best-selling probiotic products, Ancient Nutrition’s SBO probiotics Gut Restore is available at close to 45 dollars a bottle including 30 capsules.

This seems quite expensive relative to the other products reviewed. This probiotics formulation contains 25 billion live cultures or CFU. Not as many as Udo’s Choice but very competitive as a product, especially with Optibac.

Just by the way the product looks, this has been designed with a lot of thought for the consumer. It is immediately apparent that the team at Ancient Nutrition have thought about the entire GI tract system, including the stomach.

They’ve used resilient probiotic strains that can make it through the harsh stomach environment. The strains in the product have been selected because of their natural occurrence and potential to support the immune system, with clinical evidence.

You get some other digestive and immune boosting compounds in this product including a blend of mushrooms, zinc and magnesium. There are also some whole foods and superfoods included such as Licorice root and Marshmallow root.

This is where the additional cost comes into play, this is not just a probiotic but a gut formulation and the product has that feeling to it.

The capsule is the very least possible you can use in the industry, with a basic non-harmful cellulose wrapping. 2 capsules are recommended on an empty stomach. This is to reduce the heat-food induced breakdown of probiotic strains that are sensitive to temperature.

Bronson Probiotic 50 Billion CFU

Bronson Probiotic 50 Billion CFU is made by another supplement industry titan. This product has been formulated to support healthy digestion and the immune system too.

The active cultures within Bronson Probiotic have a 50 billion CFU count, one of the highest reviewed here, with 16 live strains. This is an incredible blend of probiotics and comes priced in at about 30 dollars a bottle.

This is a really good value for money product and commands the hallmark mindset and traits of a made in America product. They also suggest two servings and you could probably get away with one serving here.

The capsule is basic, probably about a middle range capsule for quality in this review. On its own website, the Bronson Probiotics formulation has an outstanding review record. We are not surprised as this is a commendable probiotic formula. CFU count has a massive impact on how many strains make it to the intestinal tract.

The product contains freeze-dried strains, improving bacterial cell survival, this means it does not need to be refrigerated. However, we still would recommend fridge storage to maintain a cold and constant environment.

The product is vegetarian friendly and gives you about a month’s supply of probiotics. Bronson probiotic 50 billion CFU is self-confessed as soy and gluten free. The product is regularly independently tested as required by international GMP standards. Which is very important but highly expensive.

Bronson probiotic 50 billion CFU contains a couple of fruit extracts, such as pineapple that can help with digestion and inulin prebiotic fibres to assist the growth of microbes. These will highly likely be independently assessed extracts from naturally growing fruits.

We really like this product and rate this one very highly on our list here.

Culturelle Probiotics: Bloating & Gas Defense

Culturelle Probiotics products are one of the most bought in the States. 25 dollars will get you 30 capsules of Culturelle® Bloating & Gas Defense, which has been designed specifically to do that.

Containing large amount of a specific Lactobacillus rhamnosus strain, this product is made to address gastrointestinal bloating and to make the digestive system run a little smoother. The product contains 5 billion CFU of that strain.

There are also additional digestive enzymes, as a proprietary blend and ginger root in the capsule to aid healthy digestion.

They suggest one capsule, which is vegetarian, is plenty with this product. The packaging mentions it does not need refrigeration, although we would suggest doing so.

This Culturelle Probiotic product is free from sugar and artificial dyes and is also allergy friendly. However, we have noticed that the product contains titanium dioxide and maltodextrin as additional fillers which are on the lower end of capsule quality.

It is worth checking the packaging for any changes if you buy or have bought this product.

This is a strongly rated and popular product on their website. However, it is not as strong as Udo’s Choice or Ancient Nutrition’s probiotic formulas as a probiotic.

Conclusion

This is a really close call, with all of the products here showing elite level knowledge of probiotic formulation.

First place goes to Bronson’s Probiotic product. Bronson Probiotic 50 Billion CFU has everything you would want from a leading probiotic supplement. Boasting massive cell counts and strain diversity.

The capsule is also of a good standard too, with proprietary technologies, GMP testing and prebiotics too. We think this is the best probiotic supplement on the list here.

Next is a choice between Ancient Nutrition and Udo’s Choice. They are pretty much indistinguishable as products, however Ancient Nutrition offer slightly more in the product with a unique design too. This is really quite a close call between these three products.

Udo’s choice is a staple probiotic, one of the originals and ranks higher than Optibac who we rate in fourth place. Both are very similar products but Udo’s choice wins out overall.

In last we have Culturelle. While this seems like a popular brand, when we look at the product it is not very impressive to us.

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