One Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) Patient's Successful Gut Protocol

Carol recovered from ME/CFS by blasting her gut with four different kinds of probiotics. Her protocol is below. Check out her story here.

Warning: Some people with ME/CFS/FM can be very sensitive to probiotics.

Carol’s Probiotic Protocol

These are the ones I’m on now. I don’t keep taking the same kind all the time. I change it up but I always want some with PRE-biotics as well.

• Raw Probiotics for Women
• Complete Probiotic by Mercola
• Perfect Probiotics
• Multidophilus 24, Super 30 bil Solaray

Her Probiotic Purchasing Primer

Not all probiotics are created equal and picking the right ones can be all important to seeing changes in your health. Here are some things I learned from my reading to look for when making a purchase of quality probiotics:

1. Get Live Bacteria – Make sure there is some sort of guarantee that the microbes are live. Probiotics are meant to deliver live critters to your gut; dead critters don’t count. Some companies say “live at manufacturing” and don’t guarantee what will be there when the product gets to you. Others promise live microbes, while some ignore the issue altogether. If they ignore the issue, I’d be inclined to ignore the manufacturer and buy elsewhere. Read the fine print on the label.
2. Abundance is important – The human body carries about 100 trillion microorganisms in its intestines, a number ten times greater than the total number of human cells in the body. So if you want to change your gut flora you need LOTS of “critters” – the more “CFU’s” the better. Look for probiotics that have billions and billions of units. Manufacturers generally referred to them as Colony Forming Units, or CFU. (A colony forming unit is a bacteria or yeast that is capable of living and reproducing to form a group of the same bacteria or yeasts.)
3. Diversity Works – The current state of science says that we have as many as 1000 different strains in our guts, so look for probiotics that have a large variety of strains. Again, read the label. The more strains the better. In advanced probiotics, we’ll talk about how different strains of bacteria affect different aspects of the body, and how bacteria become personalized, but for this primer, think the more strains the better.
4. Look for Mixtures that Contain Prebiotics – Prebiotics set the stage to allow microbial colonies to flourish.