Love taking vitamin C or echinacea to prevent a cold? Well, we’ve got bad news – the NHS themselves say they likely don’t do much to stifle the sniffles.
And some supplements, like the catchall “multivitamins,” have outright been called dangerous by some GPs because they don’t specify their ingredients and may provide far too much of some vitamins and minerals.
Now, NHS surgeon, author, and lecturer Dr Karan Rajan has shared yet another over-the-counter “health booster” he doesn’t think is worth its salt.
In a recent TikTok, the medical professional Stitched a video of a woman chugging probiotic drinks.
He said that if you’re drinking “any tasty probiotic to boost your gut health, there are three big problems”.
Why might probiotic drinks not help my gut?
According to the doctor, “most over-the-counter probiotics usually contain around one to 10 billion colony-forming units” (the “live bacteria” which are good for your microbiome).
But while that might sound like a lot, the gastrointestinal surgeon says it’s not as straightforward as all that.
“Many clinical trials demonstrating probiotic efficacy use doses between 10 billion and 100 billion,” he said – a 2020 article published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology reads, “It is generally accepted that the dose of probiotic microorganisms must be 100 million to 10 billion microorganisms for it to be effective”.
So, Dr Rajan says, the drink you can pick up at the supermarket runs the risk of being “a little underdressed for the occasion”.
Then, there’s the fact that those all-important bacteria need to be able to survive your stomach acid and digestive enzymes in order to get to our guts alive.
But because the probiotics in drinks aren’t encapsulated or protected by a physical barrier, they may not make it to your intestines, Dr Rajan claims.
Lastly, he says that “not every bacterial strain benefits every condition”. Some are meant to handle bloating, while others are better for diarrhoea.
“Expecting one strain from a probiotic drink to fix your microbiome is like expecting a single handyman to rebuild your entire house,” he added.
This is in line with the results of a 2024 paper, which “did not find a sufficiently high level of evidence to support unconditional, population-wide recommendations for other preventive endpoints we reviewed for healthy people”.
So... how should I look after my guts?
The GI surgeon says that there are more “evidence-based” approaches out there.
He adds that throwing probiotics at an unhealthy gut is like chucking cut flowers on a barren lawn ― they won’t take root without the right conditions.
To achieve those, he recommends eating “prebiotics” ― fibre-rich foods which give the bacteria already present in your gut something to chew on.
Examples include fruit, veggies, and whole grains (like oats).