I got a Suteck yogurt maker for a couple of reasons @Don Alaska , 1), the lady on the video was using one for her demonstration of making the cultured milk, 2), this brand had a warehouse one on sale. There were several on Amazon that had the optional time and temperature settings, and any of them would probably work just fine. I got some Now brand inulin prebiotic for the starter. She also shows several of the different starters that work best. Since the milk cultures for 36 hours, it requires the prebiotic food for each time you culture it, but only needs the probiotic tablets for the first time. Here is the video I watched for instructions before I ordered the yogurt maker and inulin. She chatters a lot, but does do a good job of covering all of the information about how to make this special yogurt.
I take the NOW brand powdered inulin prebiotic fiber [FOS] in my evening Teeccino, along with some NOW brand FOS from a non-inulin source. So why do you use those? The prebiotics don't contain bacteria (to my understanding.)
The prebiotics are food for the probiotics, @John Brunner . The reason you need those is because of the long culture time, and all of the lactose from the milk is gone within the first 24 hours; so if you did not put in the inulin, then the bacteria would just die after they ran out of the lactose. People use inulin from Jerusalem artichokes or chicory root, and also some people use potato starch. I have some of that, but the lady in the video said people reporting clumping when they used the potato starch, so I ordered a container of the inulin instead. This might be why @Richard Whiting does better when he eats the beans, because they have a lot of good fiber to feed whatever helpful bacteria he does have in his colon. Beans are one of the best foods with resistant starches.
As a wise man once said: Duh! One thing about inulin is that it is a polysaccharide (long chain), so it does not ferment as rapidly as an oligosaccharide (short chain), so for that reason inulin is not a good prebiotic. If you got the NOW inulin powder that I got, I think it has been pre-fermented to make it short chain (Frutcooligosaccharide) so it breaks down faster. This is FOS (short chain) from blue agave. I only put that out there because there may be a difference in the way the yogurt develops using readily available FOS versus using unmodified inulin from chicory, et al. Lots of manufacturers still call inulin a prebiotic, but as I said, unless it has been modified it is long chain, not short chain, and breaks down much slower. Sorry. Not trying to confuse things. But if your yogurt does not develop as expected (better or worse), this may be the reason.
An article on gut biomes crossed my email this morning. It discusses 2 ways for transplanting a “complete” biome into people: fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), and a synthetic microbiome created from scratch in a lab. Two recently approved products for use with FMT are transplant via colonoscopy, and pill form. The synthetic microbiome approach is met with skepticism as being way too complex to create from scratch, but might still be valuable as a research tool. This stuff is not news to many of us who follow this subject. But the article included some interesting things along the lines of our conversations in this thread. The FDA limits human fecal transplants to c. diff infections, while Australia has no such limitations, so human trials are easier to do there. One Australian gastroenterologist has performed over 35,000 biome transplants. He’s had some astonishing successes (eliminated Parkinson’s symptoms in 2 out of 12 patients), but successes have not been universal among his patients. Scientists are in possession of stool samples taken a decade ago from one of the last true hunter/gatherer tribes known (the Hadza tribe of Tanzania), and have compared them to other populations for mircobiome diversity. · Hadzans have an average 730 species. · Napali agrarians have an average of 436 species. · Napali foragers have an average of 317 species. · Californians have an average of 277 species. [As an aside, I researched (11) brands of probiotics when I started my regime. They range from having only (1) bacterial species to having (14). This is the source of my ambivalence on taking them, since doing so may be a net-negative, artificially crowding out some number of the many other necessary-yet-minority species in my biome.] The Australian doctor’s successes have been based on the species-diminished fecal transplants from citizens of industrialized societies. One wonders if biomes might be cultivated from remote tribes such as the Hadzans and then transplanted into Industrialized Man. It opens up lots of questions: repopulating biomes has demonstrated benefits, but is there a point where returns are diminished…or even harmful when transplanted in humans that no longer have a need for them? The article contains links to supporting studies for those who wish to go down rabbit holes on this subject.
My stomach has been messed up for 10 days now (it's on the mend but still not 100%), and I thought that a new probiotic I started taking might have caused it. Then I was wondering if my original probiotic was even doing anything at all. I read that you can test them by putting a pill in 1/4 cup of milk (soy or dairy) and letting it sit overnight. If there are active bacteria, it should set firm like yogurt. I put one of my original probiotics in 1/4 cup of milk, let it sit overnight, and nothing happened...it was still thin milk. Then I redid the experiment using my original 30 Billion CFU probiotic in one bowl and the new 60 Billion CFU probiotic in another. They did not set up overnight, so I let them sit longer. After 14-16 hours, both of them are firm like yogurt. So they both have some number of live bacteria.
I think that is why they recommend that if you are only using capsule probiotics that you do put them in milk to let the probiotic bacteria multiply before you take it, and not just swallow a capsule and hope it survives.
That's interesting. Do you know if I'm supposed to wait for some reaction, or just let it sit for x Hours?
I have only ever used natural probiotics and not capsules, so I do not remember how long to soak them. I just remember reading that if a person was going to use capsules, then you got a lot more benefit if you put them in warm milk and let them multiply and take it that way, @John Brunner . I would think that if you left them to get to the yogurt stage, they are probably as active as one can hope for by then.
There is no other practical way to get it far enough up the colon. It would be much slower via rectal insertion. Notice most probiotics contain Lactobacillus species, which, as the name implies, are connected to milk. I think our food is just too clean to maintain a healthy biome. Some primitive tribes even have species of Helicobacter as stomach flora. I think small intestines don't maintain a normal flora biome as the substrate moves too quickly through the gut at that point, plus the addition of many digestive substances there. Everything slows in the colon, so cultures can grow and contribute what they do to our health. When things slow down in the upper reaches of the gut is when things like SIBO and yeast begin to take over.
So please help me not poison myself. How long do you think it should sit in warm milk? The FDA says 1-2 hours is the limit for milk to sit out at room temp. How long do you think it should take to incubate in the fridge? (I know, you have limited data.) I just read an article where they incubated Lactobacillus casei in milk in the refrigerator, and they discovered that it survived better in mice than when given any other way. But they did not say how long it was incubated. I would assume that the cold temp slows things down, but would overnight get things started enough to provide a benefit? Can it incubate too long? Do the bacteria stop producing at a given level and then all die, as yeast does? Maybe I could use the capsules as starters and just make yogurt shots that contain all 12 strains. [The Renew Life probiotic I take has (7) species(?) of Lactobacillus, in addition to (4) strains of Bifidobacterium Lactis and Lactococcus Lactis LI-23.]