Do Your Probies Pass The Fart Test?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a probiotics skeptic.

How do we know which strains to use anyway? In what proportions? Do those little never-refrigerated pills really deliver the goods? Do they really pass through the stomach acid? Do we have enough to really get rid of the “bad bacteria”?

And as much as I like picturing my gooey innards as the backdrop for a Spaghetti Western (or perhaps a Garlic Bread, Lasagna, and Ribeye Western), with white-hatted Acidophilus having microscopic shoot-outs with black-hatted Candida Albicans, I’ve never had the kind of proof positive of their benefits that I have with, say, liver flushes or good old fashioned colonics.

But in the end, or “my” end, as it were, what I couldn’t quite accept in theory came through in practice.

In fact, it was during a colonic that I had my first “a-ha” moment about the little buggers. I was in Portland, Oregon doing an open system colonic (where you are free to poop and fart to your butt’s content without having to force everything through a large, dildo-y speculum), and the place had an add-on that allowed you to do a probiotic implant after the main treatment was done.

Well, I thought, that would certainly circumvent the “stomach acid” problem. Why not just take the shortcut through the service entrance rather than pass through the kitchen and long corridor to get where you are needed?

So the therapist poured the probiotic solution into the auxiliary tube, released the valve, and let gravity do the work.

Well, seconds later, I sounded like a buzzsaw with Tourette’s Syndrome.

The farting was instant and uncontrollable. As soon as the little varmints hit whatever was living in my intestines, they digested them straight away, and the byproduct of their High Noon Face Off were quickly spattered against the just-high-walled-enough colonic table, the plexiglass tombstone to their violent demise.

Now you’re actually supposed to “hold” the probiotics in your intestines so that they can repopulate the gut wall and spread their magic over the 100s of square feet that make up the endless nooks and crevices of your digestive tract. But I'm pretty sure, my little guys barely made it through the foyer before exploding into a deluge of flatulence.

So I tried again.

Nope. Same thing. Uncontrollable farting the minute they touched my rectum.

So the lesson I took home was that 1) these things DO seem to do something and 2) I probably needed them more than I thought I did.

So I kept at it, but in the traditional roundabout way, not the grease fire in the wok, yeast flambé way at the colonic place.

I found what was then an excellent brand of probiotics and took several during a road trip. Within about 45 minutes, the pain was agonizing.

As a colon cleansing aficionado, I was well aware - WELL aware - of the countless pockets of gas and poop that litter our small and large intestines. It is where dead things go to putrefy, and as they do, they slowly make us dead along with them.

So I realized that as these probiotics wended their way through my guts, they were causing their signature explosions of gas within these little pockets where there was no way out. So the pain was the concentrated gas trying to blow the walls off - as they had during my colonic - but with no place to go.

The bad news of course was that it hurt like hell for about an hour.

The good news was that they were really working.

I stuck with the process for some time until eventually the pain stopped and I intuited that I had achieved a more or less unobstructed passage through my labyrinthine intestines. No small achievement for a McDonald’s baby and erstwhile glutton!

And as my process continued, I started making my own probiotics at home, mostly in the form of hippie style kimchi and lactose fermented sauerkraut. Yum. And in most cases, I could feel (and hear) the probies making it all the way through my alimentary canal from lip to cheek.

I also created a delicious homemade miso soup, which I used to drink in large volumes while I was fasting. This would often lead to explosive "off-gassing," which could at times become uncomfortable. What I eventually discovered was that when combined with bulking agents like psyllium, the probiotics acted almost as a heat-seeking laxative, following the toxic mass down the pipes and helping to expel it with the explosive digestive salvos it created. In the right balance, it was the perfect 1-2 punch for purging your colon.

(Pro Tip: It turns out that heating the miso soup didn’t abate the force of the probiotics one bit, something that surprised me as an also erstwhile raw foodist. The little guys survived the hot tub and got right to work as if they were just climbing out of the refrigerator aisle at Erewhon. Good note.)

So I learned through this process that if you are going to opt for store bought probiotics, you can fairly easily test them by seeing how much they make you fart. If they don’t, then you didn’t take enough, or you just wasted your money. If they did, then hallelujah, Gabriel’s (or Bob’s or Lisa’s) trumpet blows for thee!

But in general unless I’m lacto-fermenting them myself I mostly shy away from probiotics. Too expensive and too risky, when you can just grow your own delicious petri jar of the good stuff right on your kitchen table.

Now am I missing some priceless strains that only a super sophisticated laboratory in Japan could come up with after decades of study and analysis? Maybe. But for that I may have to wait til I get up the courage to do a fecal matter implant treatment (IYKYK), and, courageous though I may be, that’s something I might have to wait for for a long time.

So again, there’s some more good and bad news about all of this, and it does sort of answer my question to how well this stuff works after all.

Two anecdotes will illustrate: One is that I cut myself badly on the foot and suffered a painful infection deep in a callous that would simply not go away. In a moment of true weakness, I broke down and bought a drug store topical antibiotic “creme,” the kind I used with abandon as a kid before I knew any better.

Wow. Just wow. I thought this stuff would be a little local zinger to help me work out the infection on my heel. But not even close.

Within an hour I fell into a massive, and I mean, MASSIVE depression. The world was closing in, I was distraught and hopeless. . . it was bizarre, as if the mini dose of antibiotics on my foot had somehow crept into my gut, “deflowering,” as it were, my serotonin producing organs and causing a full blown mood shut down. I’d never experienced anything like it.

Somehow I recall repeating this horrid experiment years later with identical results. Just awful.

The second illustration was, in a way, even sadder:

Now, despite my rather unpleasant demeanor, I can occasionally be something of a cad. And while I enjoy the Wild West of picking up random women and doing very grown up things with them, in recent years, I have had a horrible reaction simply to kissing strange women.

Milder cases involve a sort of mini-depression and light illness, as their unimproved microflora mix with mine and attempt to lay track, so to speak, on the delicately manicured kimchi and kraut strewn terrain of my digestive tract. They are generally thwarted within a few hours, but the damage is palpable and affects me quite badly.

On the other end of the spectrum, I spent several hours dry heaving - as in vomiting - after simple kissing with a Tinder fling. So out of whack was her flora that mine went into full on revolt at even TRYING to process out the Lasagna Western Show Down it prompted in me. Amazing.

So again, the good news is that years of probiotics really did work. They really DO increase serotonin production and increase good moods - and when they are destroyed, even a little bit, then the opposite can take over and quick.

The bad news, of course, which seems to always be the case when you improve yourself, is that your social options decrease. Probably for the best anyway, but still a shocker at how out of sync with the world we can be when we become truly healthy and also just how sick everyone else really is without even knowing it.

You can often see it walking down the street, the lumpen disfigurement, the limping, the sunken eyes. . . but in my case, I could literally TASTE it - both on the way in, and, yes, on the way out. . .

But in the end, I believe it’s still better to raise oneself up and at least model health for the unwashed masses, rather than sinking into the morass for the sake of beer hall companionship.

Of course, disgust is often a two way street. I seem to recall at least one of my paramours taking a quick phone call as she left our encounter.

“Man that guy sure farts a lot. . .”`