Ask Allie Special Edition: Probiotics and Immunity
Sabrina and I debated about whether we wanted to talk about this in here, mostly because it feels weird and kind of inappropriate to us for a probiotics company to be discussing this during the Covid-19 pandemic. Ultimately, I ended up deciding we needed to have a post about it because the number of Ask Allie submissions related to this topic is actually beginning to overwhelm me, and because our sales have temporarily increased to an expected but astonishing degree. At this time, we are still running not only at full capacity, but are working around the clock to get new packets of cultures readied for y’all. Not gonna lie: we’re mostly focusing on sourdough, because stores ran out of commercial yeast when America decided collectively to learn how to bake a few days ago.
My hope is that I can answer all of the probiotics and immunity questions here that I’ve been getting in my email, plus a few y’all haven’t asked yet. This is going to be a more science-y post than usual, and will also contain more links so you can see where my info is coming from. I think on this topic, that matters more than it normally does with the Sunday informative posts or regular Ask Allies.
This will be handy in understanding the organs of the immune system.
What is the immune system and what does it do?
Normally I like to put the pic relevant to the section at the end, but it’ll be more helpful if you can see what I’m talking about as we go along.
The simplest answer to what the immune system is and does is that it’s a set of bodily mechanisms that defend your body from infections. How it performs that task, of course, is more complicated. Let’s go through some of the process, and then we can see how it all ties together.
The body’s skin and mucosal membranes are its primary, fundamental line of defense against all manner of things: foreign objects (bread and cheese crumbs are probably most dangerous to me. Thank you, skin!), viruses, bacteria, and other such. What people are most worried about right now is the virus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease Covid-19. Flu is something that many people are also still worried about right now.
Many people also seem very worried about toilet paper and other supplies in general, and I hope they will stop worrying about that because there really is enough for everyone if everyone just buys what they need. This is, to get on my soapbox, an incredible opportunity for the world to not only stop wasting 1.3 billion tonnes, or one third, of all the food produced globally each year, but to re-learn nearly 100 years of vanishing but critically important life skills. Use some of your new time at home to watch some life skills channels or historical cooking shows on YouTube to learn some cool stuff. Apparently that kid who made the first Covid-19 tracker learned to code on YouTube.
Historical food often sounds weird despite usually being awesome (because people didn’t like gross food back when, either), and they also (period and place dependent) tend to use very commonplace ingredients I know for sure everyone’s got now. Definitely so, if you focus on common fare. It will help you waste less, and you can cook these things with your kids, roommates, partner, monkey, whatever to integrate some really exceptionally trandisciplinary learning into your routine.
Officials keep admonishing you to stop touching your face because you’re mostly touching your eyes, nose, and mouth - every time you do, you increase the likelihood that a pathogen will be hand delivered, as it were, to your mucous membranes. You are the “inside man” here, when you touch your face. Eventually, one of ‘em is gonna get through, you see, and then you and others may become ill.
It is, of course, much easier said than done when we’re talking about touching our faces. What I’ve told my kid is to try to be aware of what your hands are doing. We’re all absolutely going to keep touching our faces, but by trying to keep track of our hands we can stop it faster when it does happen.
Washing your hands, alongside not touching your face, are the two best things you can do omgritenow to help your body avoid pathogens. That, and STAYING HOME!
Once a pathogen gets past those barriers, other systems have to kick in to fix whatever went wrong earlier. The next thing that will happen is that the acquired immune system will get roarin’ to produce white blood cells (lymphocytes; mainly T and B cells) and the innate immune system will start production on phagocytes. There are some other -cytes involved, but collectively all of these bits of wonder are called leukocytes. The organs involved in producing these cells are your: bone marrow; adenoids and tonsils; spleen; lymph nodes, Peyer’s patches (in the intestines and more directly relevant to probiotics), and lymphatic vessels; and thymus.
Ideally, once your body has deployed its military, you’ll get better. In some cases, you do not, and that’s when you need to see your health care professional for help with your specific situation, because most of what happens from there is beyond the scope of this post.
What is not beyond the scope, however, is cytokine storm. You’ve probably been reading or hearing a lot about this, and it’s important as pertains to Covid-19 and many other diseases, both infectious and non. This is because there’s a growing body of evidence that in some Covid-19 patients, this is happening to them, as did with SARS, MERS, and the 1918 Spanish flu. This phenomenon really did cause a lot of deaths with those 3 diseases (especially Spanish flu in terms of how many people died).
The simplest, most stripped down way to explain cytokine storm is that your immune system completely freaks out and overreacts to whatever is happening to it. When that occurs, it floods the body with proinflammatory cytokines (a chemical signal produced by the T-cells we talked about earlier, and some macrophages), which tells various parts of the body to act like there’s a serious inflammation. In response to that, the immunological military sends new waves of forces to battle a disease it didn’t need quite so much for, and this ultimately can result in friendly fire against your body (without viable medical intervention, and sometimes with). Non-fatal instances of this include kidney damage, cardiac damage, lung damage, and damage to other bodily systems, depending on what part of your body your immune system is attacking. In the case of Covid-19, it causes ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome), which is what is killing the bulk of people who die from Covid-19.
This is the basic process of immune response.
What are probiotics, and how do I get them? What about prebiotics?
Glad you asked! Let’s cover prebiotics first. Prebiotics are types of plant fibres that feed beneficial bacteria in the gut. What basically happens is when you eat foods that contain prebiotics, you’re eating fibre your stomach can’t digest. As such, these fibres travel along, fertilitzing, in effect, the bacteria in your microbiome that help you be and stay healthy; assisting with blood glucose regulation (including indications that they may help ameliorate T1D), keeping you “regular,” and also can help you have strong and healthy bones by assisting in calcium absorption.
This is really why your mom kept nagging you to eat those veggies as a kid.
Common sources of prebiotics are potatoes, dates, artichokes, basically the whole onion family, bananas (gross), dandelions, asparagus, barley, chicory (often available in commercial supplements or fortifications, and ditto in Cajun-style coffees), oats, asparagus, leafy greens, jicama (yum), apples, cocoa beans (not sure that you can skate by on chocolate, but let’s pretend yes), seaweed, burdock (see, Jess?! That’s another reason not to get it all out of your garden!), and chia.
Generally, if you want to buy these, you’re going to buy formula, dry milk, yogurt, or whatever labeled as “fortified.”
In short, prebiotics prime your gut for good systemic health; please eat some fruits and veggies.
Lot more to that then you were expecting, huh?
You know you want to. Actually, I’d kind of like to eat that ASAP.
What then, are the probiotics? In effect, they’re the body’s classroom helper. In your gut biome, there are bacteria and yeast that live there, gobbling up all your prebiotics, bee-booping along to the tune of good health for you. Some of what they do is replace beneficial microbes when you take antibiotics, or help keep your microbiome in balance. Some specific strains can assist individuals in a variety of different states of health, too, supporting wellness and/or recovery. How they do all this magic, though, is still pretty unknown. This branch of study is basically still in its infancy, so we’re all learning about it together.
There are two primary ways you can get probiotics in your diet: fermented food/drink, or supplements.
Since I think it’s understood that I have bias here in favor of whole food probiotics, I’d like to say what I think is excellent about supplement probiotics:
They allow people who don’t know how to cook, don’t have time, or lack inclination to make whole food probiotics to have probiotics in their bodies,
Busy people. This bears repeating, because I think there’s a tendency for people who’re “in” one subculture or another to judge those who don’t do related things the same way.
Scientific studies. There are tons of studies about whole food probiotics, but the most interesting ones to me tend to be done with supplement probiotics. This is because you get to see what happens with very specific strains, and because you get to see differences in how uniform and irregular products function.
There’s probably more than what was off the top of my head, but I think this is good for now since this post is already really long. In my own practice, I recommend to clients who can’t or won’t do whole food probiotics to buy them and take them. I also recommend they research the companies on their own first, because there can be a lot of variability in quality and consistency from one company to the next. So that last sentence there is the important bit - do your research, because supplement probiotics are not all the same, and buy the best quality supplement you can for your budget if this is the way you choose to get probiotics.
What we need to talk about next is when you should or should not take probiotics. Because I live with a child and thus am used to giving bad news first to make sure the most important part of what I needed to say is heard, I’m going to first tell you when you should not take probiotics in any form without the approval and supervision of your doctor. Sorry for the meatballs in the middle of our sunshine, y’all.
Who should not take probiotics?
The tl;dr here is going to be: no one with underlying health conditions should start taking probiotics without first talking to their health care professional. Generally speaking, I recommend people with underlying health conditions not making drastic changes to diet in sum without those conversations first happening, but that’s me. I tend to be fairly conservative on matters of health.
Conditions that can be negatively affected by probiotics:
People with cancer: this is the big group. There is some evidence that probiotics can impair the effects of chemotherapy in some cancers, which is obviously bad. To the best of my knowledge, cancer related probiotics studies have only been tested using supplement forms instead of whole foods, but I can’t that doesn’t mean it isn’t transferable to whole food probiotics or that there aren’t studies about it just because I haven’t seen them.
People with acute flare ups of pancreatitis, Celiac, Chron’s, and similar should also check with the doc due to the nature of how these conditions can affect the permeability of the intestinal lining. Studies indicate that sufferers of these types of illnesses benefit more from probiotic use when it’s not an acute situation.
People with diabetes or similar conditions should discuss what types of whole food probiotics are appropriate for them, as some types of probiotic cultures produce finished products that are very high in sugar and thus contraindicated.
Any kind of autoimmune disorder or disease that makes you immunocompromised - talk to the doctor.
I feel like I wouldn’t handle whatever is going on here nearly so well as she seems to be. Aren't you glad you’re staying home, so no one can put stuff up your nose?
Are there instances when you should take probiotics? Who can take them?
Generally speaking, most people can take probiotics, but you should check with your health care professional if you have concerns.
Doctors do frequently prescribe/recommend probiotics for a number of reasons, including IBS; to counter microbiome effects of antibiotic use; and, of course, diarrhea is the big one these are recommended to support. There are others, but these are the most common.
Which culture has the most diversity?
This is the single question I’ve gotten the most of, lately, I assume because studies indicate probiotics can provide some immunity to certain viruses. Milk kefir is the most diverse. Every time, milk kefir is the most diverse. Although there are some indications that milk kefir can go as high as 61 different strains of microbes, normally you’re looking at 30-50. For reference, most yogurts come with two.
Stay clean, STAY HOME, and stay healthy, y’all!
