I gave this a shot but didn't notice much. I believe Dr. Mercola created his spore probiotic product after being told about the benefits of soil-based organisms (SBOs) like the bacillus spores by his friend, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. I saw a Mercola interview in which Dr. Klinghardt told him that you don't need to take a product like this one because you already have enough of the lactobacillus and bifidus strains in your gut, you just need to take SBOs to help them out compete any bad bacteria there.
I understood that better after watching an interview with Dr. Kiran Krishnan which I will paraphrase here: Question – If Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium can't survive our stomach acid, how can they colonize the neonatal intestinal tract? Answer – the neonatal digestive system is not fully developed, so it does not act as a barrier. The gastric pH in a neonate is far less acidic than in an adult: it is close to neutral and can be as high as 7.8, whereas the adult stomach pH ranges from 1-3, depending on whether you are in a fasted or fed state. The near neutral neonate pH levels are perfectly suited to allow the mother’s organisms to pass into the intestine of the neonate.
Another barrier to lactobacillus and bifidobacterium strains in an adult digestive system is their susceptibility to bile salts and pancreatic secretions, but those are not present in any considerable amount in a neonate. Therefore, large amounts of mother’s bacteria can pass into the child to create it’s microbiota. Mother’s milk contains 400-600 different species of organisms in large concentrations, plus a very powerful pre-biotic that the neonate cannot digest which is there to feed the probiotics during colonization. Thus the neonate is bombarded with huge amounts of mother’s good bacteria over 8 times per day. This is how nature designed our intestines to become colonized. We cannot repeat this process as adults. We already have all the good and bad bacteria seeded in our GI, so for us it’s a matter of creating an environment to favor the growth of the good bacteria over the bad bacteria. This is what transient spore probiotics do. They are like the “gut police”. They can go in and identify the bad bacteria and kill them to recondition the gut and reform the population.
We cannot reseed the gut with probiotics that are given through encapsulation. You simply cannot re-colonize a mature digestive tract unless you wipe its numbers down with antibiotics and flushes, and then use a fecal transplant. Nowhere in nature do we consume hundreds of billions of CFUs of various strains of endogenous lactobacillus and bifidobacterium species after birth.
