Plenty of people sing the praises of probiotics. These cultures of live bacteria can come in an array of products, from foods like yogurts to dietary supplements and even skin creams. Generally, these products tend to claim they’ll boost health by tweaking your microbiome, the collection of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in and on your body. And sometimes, doctors even encourage people to take probiotics after they’ve been on antibiotics, to help get things back to normal. But a new pair of studies claim that probiotics may not actually do that much good.
In two papers released in the journal Cell, researchers from The Weizmann Institute of Science examined how the 11 most widely used bacteria strains found in probiotics affect us.
In one study, the team tested the microbiomes of 25 people to see what their natural composition of gut bacteria was. Then, 15 of them — ...
