Alflorex and Zenflore: supplements worth a try for mental / gut symptoms

Therapeutic Efforts Supplements & Lifestyle
#1

I realise that I risk appearing like a shill for the manufacturer, but I am going to post this anyway. I would recommend that if what you read interests you, you corroborate what I am saying against the many reviews online for these products.

I have already mentioned Zenflore in another post, which I discovered while looking for anti-anxiety remedies. I believe it has had very positive effects on my mental sides (mainly it makes me feel more positive).

It is made by a company called PrecisionBiotics, which only has two products: Zenflore and Alflorex. These supplements are derived from bacteria passed from the mother to her baby during birth.

Alforex is aimed at treating IBS like symptoms, and I have also tried that to very noticeable positive effects. Bascially, if I am producing loose stools, I have found that taking Alflorex quickly results in much healthier stools.

Whereas I take Zenflore 2 out of 3 days, with Alflorex I use it on an “as needed” basis, as in if my stools are getting loose, I take it for a day or two and they clear up. For proper chronic IBS symtoms, people take it daily.

Neither of these supplements is cheap, at a little over $1 per pill, however a lot of the online reviews say that once you have done a full month of priming your gut with it, you can drop the intake to every other day or so. Well I did a month for each, and now my regime with them is as above (Zenflore most days, Alflorex as needed).

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#2

Both of these are Bifido Longum strains, Im pretty familiar with Align, they started offering a higher dosage of 5 billion in the US. I was taking 10 billion a day for months at a time, this was based on a study looking at CFS. I started getting spasms in my gi tract and some other things I was concerned with so I quit. Maybe its a matter of finding the right dosage. Thats one thing about probiotics, they dont really know what a optimal dosage is, as to whats most effective for desired effect, to your wasting your money past a certain dosage.
the other seems to be promoted as a psychobiotic.

I actually just posted a study where they cited B.longum dominance as undesirable for growth and development of malnourished children. They found their microbiome to be dominated with “infant” type bacteria. This species also degrades histamine.
On the other hand B. Longum was not found at all in my stool sample from Viome.

This is a pretty interesting study on this species to be aware of,
GBS is a pretty serious demyelinating autoimmune nervous system disease.

Treatment of Guillain-Barré syndrome with Bifidobacterium infantis through regulation of T helper cells subsets

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1567576918302662

#3

Very interesting, thank you. I know that they say both of these products are naturally washed out of the GI tract, so I guess the dosage is not sufficient to establish a permanent colony (and hopefully therefore avoid any unwanted sides).

#4

Im not sure about these strains, but this actually has been one of the few species capable of long term colonization. So would this be good or bad? This would possibly be a reason to get that Viome test for a few of us to compare results and see if this species is there.


They focused on a specific strain of Bifidobacterium longum , which is a common, stable, and dominant part of the human gut. María Maldonado-Gómez, from the University of Nebraska, asked 23 volunteers to take daily doses of either B. longum or a placebo pill, and checked their stool for signs of the strain’s DNA.

In most of the volunteers, the bacterium disappeared within the first month or even the first week. But in a third of them, it persisted, and for more than half a year in some cases. Unlike normal probiotics, this strain seemed to establish a permanent foothold. “I never expected that,” says Walters. “Even with part of our core microbiome, I thought that our resident strains would outcompete the new one.”

In a way, they did. By comparing the volunteers’ microbiomes, Maldonado- Gómez showed that his B. longum strain was less likely to settle down if its new hosts already had B. longum strains of their own. That makes sense: Closely related microbes should be more similar, and thus more likely to compete for the same nutrients, resources, or living spaces. If many kinds of B. longum are already present, there are few niches for an incoming strain to fill.

Maldonado-Gomez also found that the ingested strain was more likely to wash out if a volunteers’ microbiome carried a few dozen particular bacterial genes, the vast majority of which are involved in breaking down carbohydrates and other nutrients. Again, this makes sense: If the native microbes are using these genes to digest whatever food is available, there’s nothing for an immigrant strain to eat.

These results show that it is possible to turn a swallowed microbe into a permanent part of the gut, and they hint at the type of factors that make for successful colonization.