Month: January 2026

Probiotics Suggestions Update

For many months, using R2 Associations to select probiotics used a generic database from PrecisionBiome. Over the year end holidays, I computed the R2 Associations based on data from specific labs. This is far more accurate and have just been added for the following labs:

  • Biomesight (best because biggest dataset)
  • Ombre
  • uBiome
  • Thorne (smallest dataset and not as much data).

At the bottom of the suggestion page you will see a new section like below:

The range of numbers can vary greatly.

Which is best? We have multiple ways of computing probiotics. The ideal would be to do only ones that each way advocates. When there are Good and Bad counts, having a positive good and zero for bad is ideal.

The reality is that this rarely happens. I tend to favor Good count much bigger than Bad with a high positive benefit. Our knowledge is sparse and often studies results fail to duplicate. I tend to favor this method because it is an Fuji apple to Fuji apple comparison instead of the Crab Apple to Watermelon comparison that published studies tend to be.

A new Probiotics Source

A reader forwarded a Bulgaria supplier site to me. I was delighted to see their offerings!

Probiotics availability is a complex area with national laws restricting access. A good example is the US: if you are not producing a grandfathered species then there is a massive amount of testing to get approved for sale. A good example is Mutaflor, E.Coli Nissle 1917, which cannot be sold in the US despite a literal century of safe use in Europe.

This is further complicated because a probiotic claiming to be a specific species may be tested and depending on the test used be found to not be there, a different species or as claimed. There is no standardization of microbiome testing See this post for the background.

In most of Western Countries, there is a huge profit margin for probiotics, 10x or 20x the cost of production is not unusual. Often manufacturers will often prevent the import of foreign probiotics citing safety or lack of “in country safety tests”. Some people may find that they cannot import those below.

Bottom line: I take claims of species in a probiotic on face value. See bottom on selecting probiotics given a microbiome sample; most of these have very few clinical studies in English. I will be adding these to the probiotic search page over the next week.

The predicted / model impact of each probiotic above can be estimated from this page.

Over the next week, I will attempt to add modelled impact on each of these combinations on a microbiome sample using the link below on the suggestions page.