Is it better to take a probiotic pill or live culture yogurt?
It's ideal to get your nutrients from food - but for probiotics, it's actually more effective to take it as a pill. Watch Ask the Experts' integrative medicine expert Julie Chen, MD, explain the various benefits.
Transcript
I recommend probiotics in the pill form. And there's a couple reasons. One of the reasons is that you can then pick which specific strains that you're supposed to get,
so that you can be specific about that to target your health goals. [MUSIC PLAYING]
A lot of my patients ask whether probiotics are better in a pill form or whether they should just get it in their yogurt version.
In my opinion, I am very much a fundamentalist. I generally like for your nutrients to come from food form.
But in this specific situation, I recommend probiotics in the pill form. And there's a couple reasons. One of the reasons is that you can then
pick which specific strains that you're supposed to get, so that you can be specific about that to target your health goals. The other thing is then you can get the dosage right
up to the treatment dosage that we're seeing in the studies to help with those specific health goals you're trying to achieve. And then you can just take it once a day and be done with it,
so there's not having to eat yogurts throughout the day. One of my biggest pet peeves are patients who are dairy sensitive or animal dairy sensitive or casein sensitive and they
force themselves to eat a lot of yogurt just for the probiotics. Well, the problem is now you're causing a lot of gut issues when you can just take the pill form
and get the probiotics that way without causing side effects. And some of my patients who really hate the taste of plain yogurt, they'll just eat the really fruity versions of the yogurt
and then they cause sugar issues. So if you don't want to have that sit down talk with your doctor about why your sugars are going up, it's probably easiest to just take it in the pill form,
because then you can definitely target the bugs that you want, you get the dosage that you want, and you sidestep all the potential side effects.
supplements
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