Lacidofil May Help Milk Allergy Symptoms

I try to be very skeptical of claims of allergy symptom relief from commercial products. Very few of them involve serious clinical testing of the product. When I see a favorable test, therefore, I have to pay attention. The makers of Lacidofil, a probiotic, put the product to a trial of real children with atopic dermatitis (AD) from milk allergy and it appears to have worked better than a topical cream.

The report of the conference paper can be found at NutraIngredients.com.

Researchers on a new study by Institut Rosell-Lallemand have reported that its Lacidofil probiotic supplement may reduce the severity of atopic dermatitis (AD) in children when used with a topical emollient, and increase antibodies against cow’s milk allergen IgG4. ...

The company set out to test its probiotic Lacidofil in young children with AD and cow’s milk allergy. The results of the study, led by Dr Chernyshov of Ukraine’s Medical University, were presented at the Joint International Symposium New Trends in Allergy VII and the 6th Rajka Symposium on Atopic Dermatitis in Munich last month.

The company says the study involved 58 children under the age of four years. All the children were treated with emollient cream and a bath preparation, while 30 also received one Lacidofil capsule a day for a month. The other 18 received a placebo.

The Lacidofil capsule contains a combination of Lactobacillus Rosell-11 and Lactobacillus Rosell-52 strains, and about 2 billion probiotic bacteria in total.

Dr Chernyshov used the SCORAD index to assess severity of AD, and also measured immunological parametres at day 0 and day 30.

Sixty three per cent of the children taking the probiotics were seen to have a marked reduction in AD severity, compared to 32.1 per cent of those in the placebo group.

Not only did those taking the probiotic tend to use less steroid cream, but those who used none at all also saw a reduction in AD severity.

A significant decrease of T-cells potentially associated with AD was observed, as well as an increase in IgG4, a subtype of antibodies directed against cow milk allergen and considered a marker for immune tolerance.

"Emollients and probiotics have different modes of action and could be combined with each other and with other medications in AD patients. Solutions with potential steroid-sparing effect in AD patients are extremely important," the company quotes the researchers as saying.

Lactofil is made by Xymogen.

You Aren't Spending Enough Money

Digestive Advantage sent out a press release to announce that their trademark combination of probiotics and lactase is now protected by patent as well. So don't even think of copying it.

This isn't really news for anybody outside the company, but what caught my eye was a filler paragraph later on in the release.

"The lactase enzyme market is rather stagnant, with the leading brands declining in sales. We believe this is because it's not the ideal solution to lactose intolerance -- it's not always easy to take a lactase pill before eating dairy, especially if you don't know that the food you're about to eat contains dairy," said Marshall Fong, who heads the marketing team at Ganeden. "Our Digestive Advantage Lactose Intolerance combines lactase enzyme plus probiotics to increase lactose digestion throughout the digestive tract. People love our product because it works, and because they don't need to take it with every meal."

Yes, that's mostly marketing speech. But that first line jumps out. It may even be true. (Oh, I'll hear from them tomorrow.)

The lactase enzyme market is pretty much down to Lactaid, some natural foods brands, and lots of cheap house brand imitations of Lactaid. No new national brands have entered the market for years. The amount of shelf space given to them in stores - always the best indicator of how well something is selling - hasn't grown in many years.

Yet awareness of lactose intolerance is as high as its ever been.

So you aren't doing your part.

Go out and spend some money.

Here's the weird part. Digestive Advantage Lactose Intolerance Lactase Plus Formula and Lactaid and its imitators usually aren't shelved together in the store. How that helps us I can't imagine. Stores need to get their acts together. Tell your store managers.

Report From the LI Conference, part 22

First prebiotics and then, logically, probiotics. It's like scientists were methodical or something.

Strategies for Managing Individuals With Diagnosed Lactose Intolerance: Probiotics
Mary Ellen Sanders, Ph.D.
Consultant
Dairy and Food Culture Technologies
Executive Director
International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics
Centennial, Colorado

As I also reported yesterday, probiotics are bacteria or other organisms that produce beneficial effects. More specifically, getting bacteria that can digest lactose (by making their own lactase) into the large intestine means that they can reduced or eliminate symptoms by digesting the lactose that reaches them before it can ferment and give off gas.

The evidence, as usual, is small and mixed. You need to read the presentation summary carefully to realize that what it means to you isn't the same as what it means to scientists. Researchers may get excited by knowing that certain bacteria give better results in breath hydrogen tests, because that may point the way to better delivery mechanisms or knowledge of when and how to take them.

What's of far more importance to you here and now is that any of the probiotics will give symptom relief. Streptococcus thermophilus (ST) and Lactobacillus bulgaricus (LB) are the types found in yogurt, but you have to ensure that you get yogurt with the National Yogurt Association LAC seal that indicates that "live and active" cultures will be in the finished product. Other types are used in probiotic capsules, including Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus acidophilus. Those should work, but the evidence is sketchier.

All about Lactobacillus Acidophilus

Catherine Lewis, Alternative Health Journal Editor, wrote about acidophilus.

I always get flak whenever I write negatively about alternative medicine. Yet Lewis' article is a sound explanation of the uses of probiotics.

Lactobacillus Acidophilus is a homo-fermentative species in the genus Lactobacillus. Strains of this species grow naturally in the mouth, gastrointestinal tract and vagina of both humans and animals. Certain strains of Lactobacillus Acidophilus are said to have probiotics characteristics, with these strains being used in many commercial dairy products. Lactobacillus Acidophilus provides many benefits to your body including the stimulation it gives your immune system, its help with digestion, its ability to prevent infection and the way it helps manage your cholesterol levels.

Lactobacillus Acidophilus got its name from a German gastroenteritis named Ismar Isidor Boas, who founded and studied this species. The name came from “lacto” which means milk; “bacillus,” meaning rod shaped and “acidophilus” because it has acid loving properties. Because of these properties, Lactobacillus Acidophilus is also referred to as “acid-loving milk bacterium” as well as “Boas-oppler.”

Is there a "but"?

Yes, sadly. There always is.

Lewis finishes the article by saying, correctly:

Some of the best sources of L. acidophilus can be found in fermented dairy products, with the most common ones being yogurt and sweet acidophilus milk. It is also found in a number of dietary supplements. For more information on probiotic supplementation, visit the Bacteral website.

And that site is totally crackpot misinformation.

You are confronted with this banner at the top:

Toxic fecal matter in our colons is slowly killing us

“I am urging all Americans to cleanse their colons with probiotics and to take the coming health crisis seriously to fight off parasites and germs!”

There is no toxic fecal material in your colon. Cleanses and whatnot are sheer quackery. I've had four colonoscopies. That means I've had to clean out my colon of all material so that my insides would be completely visible. No toxic material ever comes out. Just normal stuff, just like every day.

What else does this site say?

Our natural barrier against viruses, germs and parasites has completely broken down and left us exposed and unprotected

That barrier is our colons. Fully 60% of our immune cells are in our intestinal tract. They’re our first line of defense against all sorts of viruses, germs, bacteria, fungi and parasites that ravage our bodies and make us ill. Thanks to food additives, pesticides, preservatives, and other chemicals, our colons are clogged up with toxic fecal waste that is leaking into our bloodstream and allowing all sorts of sicknesses to overwhelm us. They make our skin old and wrinkly. They put on 10-20 pounds of excess toxic weight….plus we compromise our immune systems…… not to mention reduced energy levels, joint discomfort, and unhealthy eyes, hair and nails.

It is an example of the bad bacteria winning the battle over the GOOD Bacteria or the Probiotics.

It’s true when they say: “Death begins in the colon.” When your bowels aren’t working, your whole body is at risk for disease and we have only a small army of Probiotics that have no chance against the enormous onslaught of germs and parasites Our Colons need to be CLEAN!

Today, the average American colon is bulging with up to 15 pounds of putrid, rotting, fecal matter. Even slender people have clogged colons. Even people who have daily bowel movements can have crusty stool parts lodged in intestinal pockets for weeks, months, even years!

I covered the nonsense that "Fully 60% of our immune cells are in our intestinal tract." before in Immune System Not in Your Gut. The rest is equally wrong.

And why does this site want you to believe this nonsense? Because it has probiotics to sell you.

Here's the simplest rule of thumb you'll ever see. If a site tries to scare you to death to sell you their products, run like hell.

That's the problem with alternative sites. Some of the information is fine. But there is seldom any discrimination. All alternatives are equal and equally fine. But they just aren't.

That's true in mainstream medicine as well, to be sure. But mainstream medicine - sometimes called allopathic medicine by the alternative community - does police itself, with strong and public arguments. The alternative community supports and defends its worst elements. That needs to end so that the best practitioners don't get tainted and ignored by the ones who are merely pushing product and trying to scare the toxic fecal matter out of you.

Rolling Your Own - Probiotics

The annual international genetically engineered machines competition, the iGEM, takes place at MIT each November. Students combine small fragments of DNA and swap them into bacteria, yeasts, or other one-celled organisms to produce new variants that can do specialized tasks. They get better at this each year, as the earlier fragments, known simply as "parts," get added to a library of functions. Much the same way as programming languages accrete blocks of code that can be dropped into place so that coders don't need to solve the same problems over and over again, but can simply and easily rely on the earlier ingenuity of others.

In previous years, students have used these bacteria for such tasks as making "probiotic bacteria, like that found in yogurt, designed to fight cavities, produce vitamins, and treat lactose intolerance" according to MIT's Technology Review magazine.

For all the hype and fear about frankenfoods, genetically tailored beasties are far more likely to do us a world of good than harm. This can't guarantee that every bacteria will be perfectly functional any more than every bit of computer code is perfect. How many people would ask that all computer programs be banned or destroyed because of that tiny risk? Genetically engineered bacteria will no more plague the world than computers will band together to get rid of us. This will remain true no matter how many movies Hollywood makes.

Yogurt and Probiotics - Part 2

Yesterday I told you that Dannon settled a class action suit over health and medical claims it made about its yogurts.

We've all seen the ads in which a glowing Jamie Leigh Curtis, the picture of 50-year-old health, smilingly spoons Activia while an off-screen announcer states that Activia is "clinically proven to regulate your digestive system in two weeks." Regulate is a code word here that means promotes a bowel movement in those with constipation. The collective twelve-year-old mentality of our humor community being what it is, more of the younger generation have probably seen the parodies of the ads on programs like Saturday Night Live than the original ads aimed at their parents and run during the national news programs along with ten thousand commercials for bladder fitness and erectile dysfunction.

Adweek reported that the ad campaign wrought the kind of health benefits on Dannon's bottom line that they could wish for in their yogurt:

In its first year, Activia sales soared to over $130 million, more than three times Dannon's original forecasts. The launch not only created a new powerhouse franchise for the world's largest yogurt company in the U.S., it helped drive one of the hottest new functional food categories: those containing probiotic ingredients.

Once we're past the cheap laughs, we get to the very adult issues of false and deceptive advertising. The lawsuit filed against Dannon claimed that:

Dannon’s own studies disproved the company’s boasts and that a study conducted by leading microbiologist and funded by Dannon determined in 2006 that there was "no conclusive evidence" of probiotics providing health benefits. The report, entitled "Probiotic Microbes: The Scientific Basis," was prepared by the American Academy of Microbiology, a leadership group of the American Society of Microbiology, the suit claims.

As another SNL bit asks, Really?

Really.

Under the settlement terms, Dannon will also change some language on Activia products, stating that the yogurt will help regulate the digestive system, IF eaten for two weeks and as part of a healthy lifestyle. The DanActive products will be changed from stating they have a positive effect on the immune system to "interact" with the digestive system's immune system.

DanActive had the word IMMUNITY in big capital letters on its bottles and was making health claims right and left. You can see it still on the DanActive site, although I don't know how long that will last.

If you were a DanActive or Activia user, you can sign up to get a cash refund at this settlement web page.

And maybe you should start saving those receipts if you eat Yo-Plus. The same Adweek article cited above also reported that on March 17, 2009, the same law firm

CSGR&R filed a class action suit in a Southern Florida District Court citing Yo-Plus' claims that its trademarked "exclusive" Optibalance bacteria cultures regulate digestive health in a way other yogurts do not.

Similar to language in the suit against Dannon, the complaint against Yo-Plus alleges, "General Mills has no support for these claims, even though it states that it does, going so far as to claim it has clinical proof. General Mills' representations are false, misleading and reasonably likely to deceive the public."

The suit further asserts, "General Mills' own studies fail to support this advertising message, and a number of them flatly contradict General Mills' claims. In fact, General Mills has never tested Yo-Plus for its ability to deliver the unique health benefits claimed in its advertising campaign."

Functional foods, foods with special nutrients or cultures added to promote health, are probably good for you in some ways, if you take care to watch that you're not just having a sugary treat disguised as medicine. The kicker is in the line that must be added. "IF eaten for two weeks and as part of a healthy lifestyle." The healthy lifestyle must come first. Functional foods aren't magic potions that substitute for doing right, exercising right, and eating right in the first place.

Do you really even need functional foods if you do all that? That's the $64 million question.

Yogurt and Probiotics - Part 1

Probiotics are the name under which companies try to sell bacteria to you. I've deliberately put that in the worst sounding way, of course. Bacteria are not simply germs that make you ill. Hundreds of varieties of bacteria naturally live in our bodies, especially in our colons. They tackle the job of digesting some of the foods that don't get digested by the rest of the intestines. Whether this is a good thing or not depends both on the type of bacteria and the food they eat. If the food is undigested lactose, then some bacteria may cause the fermentation that leads to the gas of lactose intolerance. Others digest the lactose and free us of this problem. Adding these "good" bacteria to our systems suddenly sounds a whole lot better. And people pay big money for products like Lactagen, DairyEase, and Digestive Advantage, which claim to do exactly that.

The food industry has known for many years that it doesn't work well to make offering you bacteria a selling point. When dressed up as "live and active cultures," bacteria suddenly sound much better. Cultures are merely bacteria, usually Lactobacillus bacteria. They naturally make yogurt and other fermented and cultured dairy products.

Selling just plain yogurt is no longer enough in the ultra-competitive world of supermarket sales. Even touting the general health benefits of yogurt isn't enough. Remember one marketing campaign of years past in which a group of yogurt eaters often lived to be over 100 years old? We're way past that. Yogurt now has to be an actual cure for actual diseases.

As I warned you many times in the past, though, yogurt isn't necessary yogurt. At least, the sugared, sweetened, fortified, fruit-laden, whipped, frothed, chocolately, milk solids-added concoction that is found in American supermarket dairy cases bears little resemblance to the thin, sour product that yogurt originally was. That product was good for lactose intolerants because it was auto-digesting. In other words, the cultures were sufficient to digest all or most of the lactose in the milk, making it a suitable product for anyway with mild LI. Today's products, with all those extra milk solids to make them creamier or smoother or milder or better-tasting are a crap shoot for the LI consumer.

And it's the same thing for consumer who want the health benefits of Lactobacillus bacteria. As Tara Parker Pope reported in her New York Times column:

But while there are thousands of different probiotics, only a handful have been proved effective in clinical trials. Which strain of bacteria a given product includes is often difficult to figure out.

There is no standard labeling requirement to help buyers make sense of probiotic products. The word “probiotic” on the label is not enough information to tell whether a given product will be effective for a particular health concern. Just as a doctor would prescribe different antibiotics for strep throat or tuberculosis, different probiotic species and strains confer different health benefits. ...

"Lactobacillus is just the bacterium," said Gregor Reid, director of the Canadian Research and Development Center for Probiotics. "To say a product contains Lactobacillus is like saying you’re bringing George Clooney to a party. It may be the actor, or it may be an 85-year-old guy from Atlanta who just happens to be named George Clooney. With probiotics, there are strain-to-strain differences."

Pope mentions a panel that looked at the medical literature and listed those problems for which clinical studies showed that probiotics could be helpful. That seems to be Recommendations for Probiotic Use-2008, by Martin H. Floch et al., Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology: July 2008 - Volume 42 - Issue - pp S104-S108 doi: 10.1097/MCG.0b013e31816b903f. (The full article is not available online.)

Their highest recommendations went to four uses:
• acute childhood diarrhea
• prevention of antibiotic-associated diarrhea
• preventing and maintaining remission in pouchitis
• immune response for the treatment and prevention of atopic eczema associated with cow's milk allergy

Those are rather specialized, although the last is good news for some people with milk allergies.

So what about all those ubiquitous yogurt commercials that make so many more claims? Oops.

Dannon, one of the biggest sellers of probiotic yogurts, settled a class-action lawsuit this month over its Activia yogurts and DanActive yogurt drinks, which claimed to help regulate digestion and stimulate the immune system. As part of the $35 million settlement, Dannon agreed to reimburse dissatisfied consumers and make labeling changes, among them adding the scientific names of probiotic strains it uses.

I'll talk about that case and the others that are pending, tomorrow.

GoodBelly - the Anti-Antibiotic

I don't even remember what sent me to the doctor. Not even my doctor, but the after-hours emergency clinic you can go to when your regular doctor isn't in the office. But I went and got the requisite dose of antibiotics.

And that's when I got really sick.

Antibiotics kill germs. Wrong. Antibiotics kill bacteria. All bacteria, indiscriminately, the good bacteria along with the bad. Antibiotics famously kill off the bacteria in your colon and that can lead to diarrhea. Horrible, constant diarrhea that lasts until the bacteria grow back. Which they can't do until after you stop taking the antibiotics.

The standard advice to lessen the horrid nature of the diarrhea is to eat yogurt, so that the active cultures - bacteria - can replenish the good stock in the colon. That has a few drawbacks for people trying to avoid dairy.

Aha. A niche for a product to fill.

Enter GoodBelly, the probiotic fruit drink.

Meet GoodBelly!

That's right, GoodBelly--a probiotic fruit drink packed full of probiotics and essential nutrients.

GoodBelly contains 20 billion live and active probiotic cultures per serving, which have been clinically tested to support digestive and immune health.

All GoodBelly products are fabulously free of dairy (it's not yogurt, it's a fruit drink!), wheat-free, soy-free, and entirely vegan, too. Why? Because we wouldn't have it any other way.

Of course, the GoodBelly folks don't limit their claims for goodness just to times when you're taking antibiotics. They tout their probiotics for all seasons. Maybe. You can test for yourself since they offer a buy one, get one free coupon on their site.

Digestive Advantage Free Sample

The economy may be imitating the Wacky Wave at a Waterworld Theme Park but there are benefits to be had. Everyone giving out free samples, for one.

I mentioned Lactaid's free samples a few days ago.

Now the folks at Ganeden Biotech have let me know that they're giving away a free 30-day supply of Digestive Advantage Lactose Intolerance formula (or Irritable Bowel Syndrome or Gas Defense Formula) with a $4.95 shipping and handling charge.

Go to their special offer page for all the details.