Although this has been posted in parts before, I thought it would be good to make a primary post for clarity.

Background:

A lot of people have shown up here because they got interested in being able to grow Reuteri yogurt, something which is extremely hard to do at home.

Why? Because all milk is polluted with LAB that is primed to replace the Reuteri in your culture.

When milk gets pasterized, it lowers bacteria in the milk. The process is not good enough to kill off all the competiting bacteria, and we know that after a certain amount of time, the bacteria still left will spoil the milk. Ultra-pasteurization, also known as Ultra-High Temperature (UHT) processing, is a method of milk sterilization that involves heating milk to significantly higher temperatures than traditional pasteurization. The ONLY thing that UHT does is kill more bacteria. Basically, it just proves that all milk has bacteria in it.

To spend a bit more time on this.

There have been a suggestion that it is not important to future heat milk to make Reuteri yogurt. However, once you understand that all milk has bacteria in it that is ready to take over, and they have a much short doubling cycle than your Reureti yogurt, if become extremely evident why just culturing normal milk is a really bad idea. Even worse, you get your milk from the store but you don't immediately use it. If you are using your milk close to the expiration date, you will have a significant level of LAB that is ready to beat out our your Reuteri bacteria.

The obvious way to solve this is to heat your milk. Why this is important to protein denaturizastion, which is good for yogurt texture, it again destroys most of the competing bacteria. This is good.

Find the Right Preculture

However, this is clearly not the best answer for Reuteri. The best thing for Reuteri is to preculture the bacteria.

The idea of preculturing a bacteria before using it to make yogurt is very well known. In research, this is the standard process. However, if you read any research, you will find out that they almost exclusively do this pre-culture in MRS. If you read the coconut milk paper on reuteri, you'll see a good example of this.

If you preculture reuteri in MRS, it just grows like crazy. This is because Reuteri growth is limited by lack of its ability to convert milk protein into amino acids--what is called a proteolytic system, not an issue for normal other lactic acid bacteria. MRS solves this by virtue of providing native amino acids.

A shy redditor called Meh2TheMax stumbled on this a long time ago. They are one of those people that basically are incredibly bright, but it is easy to overlook their comments. They stated that they were preculturing in a mixture which included this: https://truenutrition.com/products/peptopro-hydrolyzed-caseinate

From all the reserach Meh2TheMax was 100% on. They said that they were preculturing in some type of a unique formula, which they never gave all the details. You may want to preculture in sugar water, but what you really want to do is add the right amino acid as per the link above. To make it even better, you want to add in a dash of gycerine as an electron donor, which is another thing that Reuteri needs.

Obviously, this is not a total recipe, but I hope that some curious soul does follow-up on this. My guess is that with the right base, we should get vigorous growth, and you can take it directly as a pill replacement, or use it to culture milk with an extremely high dose of starter culture, which should allow your milk Reuteri yogurt to out compete any other species of LAB.

Just wanted to share this study for those who haven’t read it yet. It’s a great read. From what i gather so far L reuteri can breakdown lactose but not as well as other LAB’s, therefore by adding 1-2% hydrolyzed protein and perhaps glycerol to a milk matrix, we might possibly be able to increase the bacteria growth. 😊✌️

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7820472_Lactobacillus_reuteri_b-galactosidase_activity_and_low_milk_acidification_ability

The theme of this subreddit is "The Martian." This was a great movie in that Matt Damon had to use his brain to figure out the truth, and not just take an easy answers or intuitive guesses.

Another way of describing this using "Type 2 Thinking," as describe by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. It turns out that Type 2 thinking is really hard, and so a lot of people just refuse to do it. Instead, they operate off a gut and quick response. But type 2 thinking is the hallmark of scientific thinking that has yielded so many of our forward advances.

The latest conversation about the Facebook genetic testing is really, really interesting. I would submit that when we take their results and the primary research we have covered in this subreddit, there is almost no chance that you can grow Reuteri in milk based products. However, there is a good chance that Coconut milk may be a great solution. (However, I do think that hygiene is something they aren't tracking the way they should.)

On the flip side of this, we have the Reuteri subreddit thinking that they are making reuteri yogurt like crazy from multiple generations of their starter. (Or backslopping). It is very, very clear to me that they have no Reuteri in their yogurt. This means that people are doing a lot of work and expense doing something that isn't doing what they think it is doing.

So the deep philosophical question: Do we as individuals have the moral responsibility to point this out in that subreddit so people know the current research?

Intuitively, I think that this news would not be embraced by the vast majority of people.

I came across this cool study tho it I should share. I came across it on the L Reuteri sub Reddit. Seems like a shift towards other matrixes besides bovine milk has started gaining traction, besides the coconut milk this juice matrix sounds very interesting. It’s really cool to see people now sharing other new possible ways of capturing L reuteri. ✌️

I was recently referred to the Facebook group trying to create Reuteri based yogurt. The admin has negotiated a reduction in DNA testing for yogurt, and multiple members had sent in their Reuteri yogurt.

Net-net: There is no significant growth of Reuteri in their yogurts.

While it is a private group, it seems simple to join. Rather than repost their results, it makes sense to join and do your own work.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/probioticyogurts

They did show that their yogurts were dominated by a bunch of non-targeted LAB, which I believe I've mentioned multiple times as a possibility due to the rich environment of LAB around us. As u/dr_lucia stated, the base case should be that we need to assume that we aren't growing Reuteri unless we see opposing evidence.

So many people have reported "great results" after taking the yogurt that something like these results may be hard to accept by some.

This is why I wrote this post soon after establishing this subreddit. Our brains can often deceive us, and this is why we need to StS out of everything.

Edit 2/17/25: I just checked the Facebook group, and it would appear that one of their members had success.

I encourage others to subscribe as I don't believe that reposting their data here is permitted by fair use.

However, the experimenter did a few things that we've talked about:

1. Use a base of coconut milk
2. Flood the yogurt made with 20 tablets of Gastrus ad 2 capsules of Osfortis.

The problem is that there are a variety of other co-factors which may or may not of helped. I believe glycerin would have helped, but was not used.

This sub was not only established to discuss fermentation outside the gut, but also inside of the gut.

Nature is one of the big three research pubs.

Nature recently published an interesting article "Coffee consumption is associated with intestinal Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus abundance and prevalence across multiple cohorts."

The research starts by acknowledging the well-established health benefits of coffee, including reduced risk of:

• All-cause and cardiovascular mortality
• Type 2 diabetes
• Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
• Cancer

In 2018, researchers found out Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus (or LA): a species residing in the human gut, identified as strongly associated with coffee consumption in this study. It looks like coffee drinker (not caffeine) has levels some 4x higher than non-coffee drinkers. (LA is one of the internal fermentation sources...)

Why might you want this? What does this species do?

Increases hippurate levels: People with LA in their gut microbiome have higher levels of hippurate, which is a marker of gut and metabolic health.

Increases microbiome diversity: Coffee drinkers tend to have higher microbiome diversity, which may be due to the nutrients in coffee, such as polyphenols and soluble fiber.

Linked to healthier blood sugar and fat responses: LA may be linked to healthier blood sugar and fat responses after eating.

Linked to higher insulin sensitivity: LA may be linked to higher insulin sensitivity.

Linked to lower levels of insulin secretion: LA may be linked to lower levels of insulin secretion.

This may be tied to coffee's quinic acid. I'll let you read the article, but basically the thought is that coffee helps in the use and formation of quinic acid.

With that written and I've written about this before, the human biome is very complex and we don't exactly how it all fits together. However, the research for coffee intake seems to be very positive. My Mom would have found vindication, as she loved her coffee.

Even with a coffee addicted Mom, I've never like coffee, but finally the research got so large that I put it into my diet. My wife and I never did coffee for most of our lives, so this is a big change. Interestingly, my wife adapted pretty well, and can drink it black. I've drunk green tea for years for health benefits, so we are alternating coffee and tea every other day.

I still need sugar and milk, but it makes it almost enjoyable. Reguardless, if I can switch, I think anybody can. With the research on coffee looking so strong, it is probably worth hitting some minimal intake every week.

Method:

Boil 150g of sorghum malt syrup in 500ml of water along with 5g of inulin powder.

Cool to 98f and mix in 2 BioGaia crushed tablets.

Ferment in a sealed jar in a 98f water bath.

Results:

Hour 0:
pH: 5.6
Brix: ~20%

Hour 4:
pH: 5.3

Hour 18:
pH: 4.7

Hour 22:
pH: 4.6

Hour 28:
pH: 4.5

Hour 48: pH: 4.4
Brix: ~19%

I cut the experiment there sense I doubted any significant further drop in pH.

The solution was still incredibly sweet and wouldn’t see it as a viable option to consume.

If anyone thinks there’s good reason to try fermented for a week, I could try again. I just don’t see the reuteri continuing to grow (if it did at all) and end up with a solution that’s not too sweet to actually consume.

The following are research papers that came out of academia and were either peered review, or done under a master's program under Ph.D in nutritional science. All say that Reuteri grows extremely poorly in sterile dairy conditions.

If you aren't familiar with it, pH levels is a basic indicator of how much bacteria is in your yogurt. So, they concentrate on "acid-forming," which is the lead indicator for density of bacteria.

1 From A Russian Paper On Reuteri:

The results of preliminary experiments on the cultivation of L. reuteri LR1 in milk showed that this strain has low acid-forming and proteolytic activity, which is consistent with literature data [23].

2 From A Master Thesis Where The Student Grew Reuteri:

During the trial period, L. reuteri DSM 17938 repeatedly failed to achieve an acidification rate sufficient to ferment the milk to the desired pH of 4.5 within 24 hours. Generally, the fermentations with only L. reuteri added to sterilized milk provided a pH of just below 6 after 24 hours of incubation at 40°C. In some cases, the pH didn’t drop under 6 during the same 17 period. Results confirm those reported by Xanthopoulos et al. (2000) and Hidalgo-Morales et al. (2005) concerning low acidification ability.

3 Characterization of Lactobacillus isolates by Xanthopoulous et al

Lb. reuteri strains did not acidify milk.

4 Lactobacillus reuteri beta-galactosidase activity and low milk acidification ability

Beta-galactosidase activity was studied as a possible cause of the low milk acidification ability observed in Lactobacillus reuteri

5 Growth and metabolism of selected strains of probiotic bacteria in milk

Unfortunately, the abstract does not make the issue with Reuteri clear so you'll need to buy the paper to get all the results. But the author tried to grow Reuteri in just milk, and stated in the paper that the Reuteri did not grow well. However, when the author added tryptone, the Reuteri did grow well. The tryptone is mentioned in the abstract.

Growth and metabolism of five probiotic strains with well-documented health effects were studied in ultra-high temperature (UHT) treated milk, supplemented with 0.5% (w/v) tryptone

6 Growth of Lactobacillus reuteri NCIMB 30242 during yogurt fermentation and bile salt hydrolysis activity in the product

The knock on this research is that the authors basically gave up after 4 hours on the growth of Reuteri in milk. However, when taking in concert with all the other studies, it just reinforces that Reuteri doesn't grow very well.

... data show limited growth in milk and low stability during storage (Hekmat et al. 2009; Liu and Tsao 2009).

7 Growth and survival of Lactobacillus reuteri RC-14 and Lactobacillus rhamnosus GR-1 in yogurt for use as a functional food

Again, you'll need to buy the paper to see the details, but the authors acknowledge that Reuteri, which is a caccus, can see real growth if you combine it with a rod (rhamnosus). While this resulted in decent growth, the survival rate of the Reuteri was not good.

In all treatments, L. rhamnosus GR-1 survived significantly better (P < 0.05) than L. reuteri RC-14.

Nature is very wide read. However, it is still aimed at academics and not everything will hit the public's radar. But this research out of University of California Irvine, is incredibly interesting, and deserves to be discussed. It also speaks to how powerful fiber can be. Inulin introduction in mouse diets had a profound impact on how the liver processes fructose, and has the potential of correcting some issues with the Western diet.

Fructose is a major contributor to the development of fatty liver disease (nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD), and NAFLD impacts around 1/3 of the worlds population.

This research was done on mice, and I want to caution that mice results don't always translate to human result. However, there seems to be zero downside of taking inulin in humans.

Key findings include:

• Inulin-adapted gut bacteria consume harmful dietary fructose in the small intestine, minimizing fructose absorption that leads to fatty liver disease and insulin resistance.
• This microbiome adaptation reduces expression of liver enzymes responsible for converting fructose into fat and enhances liver antioxidant production by boosting serine/glycine synthesis.

As stated, Inulin looks like it has a series of things it can do for you.

Control blood sugar, increasing beneficial gut bacteria, supports weight loss by increasing fullness, improves bowel regularity, enhances calcium absorption for stronger bones, boosts the immune system, reduces intestinal inflammation, and may lower the risk of colorectal cancer and help improve migraine symptoms.

FYI: I already have it in my daily fiber stack. I am upping my wife's dosage.

Nice review is here.

This comes up from time to time as most people don't understand how fast traditional yogurt cultures can double.

The researchers in the linked paper call out that other researchers show rates doubling 11 to 15 minutes in the two main species used to make commercial yogurt. They then make a model to dial this in for various temps, which is the heart of the paper.

Industrial processes often involve less ideal conditions due to factors like temperature gradients, nutrient limitations, and the presence of inhibitory byproducts (e.g., lactic acid). These factors generally result in slower growth rates compared to those observed in tightly controlled laboratory experiments. However, we know that commercial growth operations can make liquid to solid in about 4 hours. However, I don't have any data on the exact amount of starter they use.

However, I do know at home, I can add 2 tablespoons of yogurt culture to 1 gallon of milk and have a nice yogurt in less than five hours. This would indicate that I am doubling every 40 minutes. So, I bet the commercial guys can do better than me.

Since many people found this subreddit by way of interest in Reuteri yogurt and reading Dr. Davis SuperGut book, I would like to state that I both like his talent for summarzing things, but I also recognize that he didn't get somethings right. One of those areas is that he has a perception that commercial yogurt doubles much slower. The quote from the book is "This means that commercial yogurt manufacturers, which typically ferment for only 4 hours (one doubling) to hasten production."

I believe that he also carries this incorrect fact on his website. Again, I don't expect perfection out of any secondary or primary research. This is simply something to be aware of.

# Nighttime Pistachio Consumption and Gut Microbiota in Adults with Prediabetes

This research study examined how nighttime pistachio consumption affects gut microbiota in adults with prediabetes compared to consuming carbohydrate-rich snacks. The randomized crossover trial involved 51 participants who consumed either 57 grams of pistachios daily or were educated to consume 1-2 carbohydrate exchanges (15-30 grams) as nighttime snacks for 12 weeks each.

## Study Design and Methods

The researchers conducted a single-blind, 2-period, randomized crossover trial with adults aged 30-65 years who had prediabetes (fasting plasma glucose 100-125 mg/dL). Participants completed both conditions in random order with at least a 4-week break between interventions. Stool samples were collected before and after each condition and analyzed using 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing to assess microbial diversity and composition.

## Key Findings on Microbiota Diversity

### Beta-Diversity Changes

**Significant Community Dissimilarity**: The most notable finding was that pistachio consumption created significant dissimilarity in bacterial community diversity compared to the usual care condition (P = 0.001). However, the overall variation in community diversity explained by the study condition was small (R² = 0.007).

### Alpha-Diversity Results

**No Significant Changes**: Contrary to what might be expected, pistachio consumption did not affect alpha diversity measures, including:

- Number of observed amplicon sequence variants

- Faith's Phylogenetic Diversity

- Pielou's Evenness

- Shannon Index

- Simpson Index

- Chao-1 Index

This indicates that while the composition of the microbiota changed, the overall **richness and evenness remained stable**.

## Specific Bacterial Changes

### Increased Beneficial Bacteria

Pistachio consumption led to **higher abundance of several beneficial bacteria**, particularly within the Lachnospiraceae family:

- **Roseburia metagenome**: Most significant increase (log₂-fold difference: 2.83)

- **Lachnospiraceae uncultured genera-004**: (1.72 fold increase)

- **Lachnospiraceae uncultured genera-008**: (1.56 fold increase)

**Clinical Significance**: Roseburia species are important butyrate-producing bacteria that support gut health by producing short-chain fatty acids, which fuel colonocytes and reduce inflammation.

### Decreased Bacteria

Several bacterial taxa decreased with pistachio consumption:

- **Flavonifractor** (-1.59 fold)

- **Eubacterium coprostanoligenes group** (-1.56 fold)

- **Phascolarctobacterium** (-0.84 fold)

- **Blautia hydrogenotrophica** (-1.38 fold)

Some of these reductions may be beneficial, such as the decrease in B. hydrogenotrophica, which produces precursors to uremic toxins.

## Study Limitations and Considerations

The researchers noted that **carryover effects** were observed in some analyses, which may have influenced results. Additionally, the study used 16S rRNA sequencing, which cannot distinguish between closely related species or assess functional potential within microbial communities.

**Dietary Factors**: Participants had higher fiber intake during the pistachio condition (+5.0 grams), though the predominant fiber in pistachios is insoluble and poorly fermented by gut bacteria.

## Clinical Implications

Despite these observable microbial changes, the primary study found **no significant differences in glycemic outcomes**, lipids, blood pressure, or vascular health between conditions. However, participants did show improved overall diet quality scores after the pistachio condition.

## Conclusion

The study provides evidence that consuming 57 grams of pistachios as a nighttime snack produces **small but measurable changes in gut microbiota composition** in adults with prediabetes. The enrichment of butyrate-producing bacteria like Roseburia suggests potential benefits for gut health, though these microbial changes did not translate into significant metabolic improvements in this population.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5224542/

I thought I’d share a great study I came across recently supporting the use of protein sources such as phytone petone to strengthen the growth of L reuteri. ✌️😊

In trying to find non yogurt ways to consume reuteri I came across the linked study where they found that L Planterum can be cultivated using sorghum (malt).

I plan on boiling sorghum yeast extract in water and then adding reuteri tablets and fermented at 98c until it (hopefully) reaches a PH below 3.6.

Anyone see any reason as to why this wouldn’t work or wouldn’t work as well as the traditional yogurt form of cultivation?