Probiotic Concern

[jasonD2]

Just made a frightening discovery- turns out the probiotics i have been taking for a long time now contain milk in them (jarrowdophilus). not sure when the company changed the formulation, but I may have been putting dairy into my system without knowing it for a year or more. could this have caused any serious damage if my body was reacting to dairy for all this time? i am severely lactose intolerant and cant handle any dairy at all. the supplements surprisingly werent giving me symptoms of lactose intolerance, but i have been dealing with bad constipation and poor bowel habits that have been worse over the course of the past 1-2 years. i'd appreciate any feedback - thanks

[Ursa Major]

Constipation is one of the more obvious symptoms of dairy intolerance. So, I guess it was probably due to the probiotic.

Yes, unfortunately, you may have been doing damage by taking this probiotic. It is too bad that they will put dairy into probiotics at all, with so many people being intolerant to it.

The probiotic from Genestra is free of all problem ingredients. You may want to try that one. Here it is usually only available through a naturopathic or homeopathic doctor. I don't know about the US.

Now that you know, I hope you will feel better soon.

[ravenwoodglass]

Just made a frightening discovery- turns out the probiotics i have been taking for a long time now contain milk in them (jarrowdophilus). not sure when the company changed the formulation, but I may have been putting dairy into my system without knowing it for a year or more. could this have caused any serious damage if my body was reacting to dairy for all this time? i am severely lactose intolerant and cant handle any dairy at all. the supplements surprisingly werent giving me symptoms of lactose intolerance, but i have been dealing with bad constipation and poor bowel habits that have been worse over the course of the past 1-2 years. i'd appreciate any feedback - thanks

Jason, You may not have been getting symptoms of lactose intolerance because you may not be sensitive to lactose any longer. Depending on how long you have been gluten free your villi may have healed enough to for you to handle lactose now. If you have an intolerance to casien, the protein rather than the lactose, the sugar in milk, that is usually permanent. One thing my naturopath told me when we had a hard time finding a soy and casien free probiotic was that saurkraut has many of the same probiotic properties. You could also do a short challenge with something like yogurt and see if you can tolerate it now, that would be another good way to balance the flora.

[jasonD2]

thats true, however, ive only been gluten free for the past 2 weeks. my antibody test for anti-gliadin came back slightly elevated so i don't know how much villi damage has occurred (if any) but i do know that i am so sensitive to lactose that if i take a prescription med with lactose as a filler it will give me problems. havent experienced that with the probiotics, but my constipation and bowel function has gotten worse over the past 1-2 yrs and the whole time i was on those probiotics on and off.