Thank you for posting! I haven’t clicked yet, but I got excited just about the title.
Been doing a lot of research lately --let me know what you think…
I will - reading it now.
I recently had a long overdue visit to our family doctor & she asked about my son. She’s agreed to try to help me with any kind of physical testing we need that the psychiatrist & mental hospitals will overlook or push me off about.
Edit: It’s a lot to digest (pun?), so I’ll read it a few more times, but it sounds very promising & I’m going to buy some probiotics & prebiotics if I think I can find some good ones. I think I’ll take some too.
It’s a good reminder that they don’t know exactly what causes mental illness, and they don’t really know how or why the drugs work - and that the body is a complete system with physical problems affecting the mind.
It also reminded me of what I know about organic gardening. If you garden organic, you don’t really feed your plants. You feed the microherd, that in turn feeds your plants. The herd is a complicated ecosystem that includes bacteria & fungus & all kinds of other little things.
Interestingly enough, chemical fertilizers kill the microherd. So, if you’re using 10-10-10 or Miracle Grow on your yard or garden, you’re killing all the self-sustaining stuff.
It makes me wonder if some of the chemicals in our food, or drugs that we take, or anything else might be killing our loved one’s own personal microherd of beneficial bacteria.
Now, I’m wondering if probiotics in capsule form are as good as eating/drinking something with them in it. And, how much of this stuff yogurt has. I think I mentioned how easy it is to make your own homemade yogurt with a cup of store bought as a starter. Maybe you can even order starter mix with specific bacteria in it?
Off to do a little more research & maybe make a trip to the store.
I heard about this recently on NPR. Fascinating stuff. In fact after hearing the story I’m feeding my grandkids 1/2 cup of yogurt every morning. It can’t hurt.
My fancy pre-biotics & pro-biotics just got here - shipped with a cold pack.
In case anyone is curious, I ordered Ther-Biotic Complete from Klaire Labs & their Galactomune prebiotics.
They seemed to be a reputable company from what I could find out & they were the only ones that had the prebiotic that seemed to give the best results in the study.
I’m still not sure that I have what the study would say is effective, but it’s the closest mix I could find commercially, so we’ll give it a try. My son’s on board with taking it, so that’s a plus.
And, I’ll sacrifice a few of the probiotic capsules to some homemade yogurt to make sure they do contain live cultures & to increase our intake. I read that if you do that, you can use your yogurt as starter for the next few batches, but after a few generations, you should start over because one of the more common probiotics will take over & crowd out the rest.
It’s a good thing we both like yogurt - homemade is good, but plain and not very sweet, so we add honey & fruit as we eat it. I might even splurge & go down to our grass-fed beef store & get a glass bottle of really good milk to make it with.
It’ll be my experiment of the month - I’ll let you guys know how it works out & if I see any differences in a month’s time. It certainly couldn’t hurt either one of us.
Rather than taking supplements which I find expensive and does not work for me I try to eat better such as including sour kraut, Kim Chee, Kombucha, miso soup and other food items that have the good probiotics for my health.
I just bought some miso:)
I like the taste of Miso, but I have a hard time thinking there’s something beneficial in a paste or powder. How do you make yours? We have a huge international grocery store (the kind where I can’t read the labels or understand most of the other shoppers/staff) that I love, so I’m sure I could get anything - if I knew what to get.
The rest of the stuff I can’t stomach - yogurt’s good though.
I’m going to use some of these expensive probiotics I bought to make homemade yogurt, so I’ll stretch them.
The supplements I bought were more because I can’t always get my son to eat healthy stuff.
He’ll do it for a few days, then get tired of it. Like I had him hooked on cucumber salads with lots of vinegar and some onions/peppers/tomatoes mixed in. It’s all he wanted for about 3 days, then he got sick of it.
He might actually try Kim Chee or Kombucha though. He’ll eat Thai hot pot with octopus & everything in it. I think he may have tried sour kraut on a hot dog once & thought it was OK, but nothing to write home about.
Same here, I love all kinds of kraut and fermented veggies, I am actually taking a fermenting class this month to learn how to make my own…can’t wait. 
I’ve read similar articles about this type of research and it does make sense. I use them and I started giving them to my daughter, who has schizophrenia. I do believe she is more engaged and a little less psychotic, with the added benefits of overall improved health.
I still have the probiotics, but didn’t have a lot of luck remembering to take them.
However, I bought my son some Kimchi & he loves it.
So, I bought a couple different flavors of bottled Kombucha today & he likes that too. One was green with algae & spirullina & stuff in it - I wasn’t a fan, but he liked it OK. We both liked the one with lemon, raspberry & ginger in it.
So, I’m thinking I’ll try making Kombucha again. I did it probably 20 years or more ago when it first became somewhat popular, but the SCOBY thing kind of freaked me out so I only made one batch.
@Catherine, how did the fermenting class go? What did you learn to make?
At $5 to $8 (Walmart vs. Fresh Market) for a smallish jar of Kimchi, I guess I could learn to make it.
After trying the Kombucha, he actually asked me if I remembered to get the Kimchi, which I did not. So, he likes it and eats it without me reminding him it’s good for him. So far, I’m not a fan. I didn’t remember to try the kind we got from Walmart, but the jar from Fresh Market was like crunchy fire. I like spicy food to a degree, but this went way past anything I’d enjoy.
Fermenting class went well. It was taught by the owner and proprietor of Krazy Kraut in Columbus, Ohio. So he showed us how to make his recipe. His kraut is unlike any other and so delicious. The jar I made in class turned out great. When I tried to do it on my own, I messed up and left out a couple of key ingredients by mistake. It was just so so, not as good as the first time, but I will try again later. http://fermentedkrazykraut.com
I remember my grandmother eating saur kraut, but she’d buy the kind in the bag at the grocery store & I think the smell put me off. My husband loves it though.
I’ll check out that link.
I was thinking that I don’t even know what it’s supposed to taste like - just how it looks.
Thanks for sharing.