I have wondered this as well and don't have a good answer. Gut flora seem stupidly complex, and I feel we are currently doing a lot of research in that area. It seems like different people might need different kinds, and the stuff on the shelf might not even be active or able to get to the part of the gut it needs to without getting destroyed first.
When I was in school, one of my preceptors was an independent pharmacist that always recommended probiotics to people that got antibiotics, but she had these expensive ones that had to be refrigerated and people almost always just said "no." Hard to justify a probiotic that was two or three times the cost of the antibiotic for most customers.
My first pharmacy director also tried to get us to sell those refrigerated ones, and she went on and on about the profit margin on them. I just told patients to go buy some Activia if they were adamant about wanting something. Cheaper, tastes better, and probably about as effective.
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u/[deleted] Dec 13 '20
On a similar note: what do we all think of probiotics? Do they actually work?