Biogaia Osfortis (l. reuteri) yoghurt recipe and remission anecdote, unknown author

[szrk]

Something like 6 months ago I found a comment on the cfs subreddit discussing making a lactose-free yoghurt with Biogaia Osfortis. They claimed to experience a near remission while taking it which they believed was BH4-related. I downloaded the pdf of instructions they attached, sent it to a friend and then forgot about it. At some point the post was deleted, my guess is one of Reddit's frequent spam scans got it due to the link. Attached is the original PDF they had linked.

I'm wondering if anyone has tried a very high dose l. reuteri treatment before or if anyone has an anecodte of very high dose probiotics helping. I'm not sure whether this person actually experienced PEM however. Either way will probably try this soon as Amazon here lets you return appliances like yoghurt makers after using them.

 

[Byles]

Interesting. I recently read Super Gut by William Davis and I think he's the one who popularised the idea of cultivating specific probiotic strains in yoghurt. It's often difficult to find the exact strain used (in this case Lactobacillus reuteri ATCC PTA
6475).
Just eating fermented foods several times a day might already be beneficial .
Also you can find second hand basic yoghurt makers online very easily and I'm sure as well in thrift stores. Unfortunately they usually only have one temperature setting, but otherwise are fine.

 

[Byles]

By the way I don't think Reddit deletes much posts in retrospect and it's much more likely it was the poster himself that did that. You still have the original link?

 

[szrk]

By the way I don't think Reddit deletes much posts in retrospect and it's much more likely it was the poster himself that did that. You still have the original link?

I do not have the original link, I saved the post but it's not in my saved anymore. I might be able to scrape one of those Reddit archives but I think those have all gotten a bit broken over the last few years. I'm fairly familiar with Reddit's spam filtering and it's not uncommon for posts to be deleted by the spam filter months after posting. It's a weird Reddit idiosyncraticity. Given google drive links to PDFs are often used for scams nowadays it seems decently likely to me. I'm sure they could've also removed it themselves or been banned from reddit for something unrelated though. Strange mystery I guess lol.

Also you can find second hand basic yoghurt makers online very easily and I'm sure as well in thrift stores. Unfortunately they usually only have one temperature setting, but otherwise are fine.

Yeah definitely, my rice cooker even has a yoghurt mode. I just want to try doing it with close to the perfect temperature to maximise the chance of it working since it's going to be a lot of effort.

 

[Byles]

Im happily making soy yoghurt for several weeks now with an old yoghurt maker. Works well, but I keep an eye out for a better one, with adjustable temperature. I don't like buying another thing though.

Anyway keep us updated @szrk . People experimenting with specific strains for yoghurt I find interesting anyway. Be it it regular or plant based.

 

[eebee]

the person who made that document does specify that they have a deficiency of BH4, but unfortunately for us, that appears to be the opposite in most people with ME, who seem to have elevated BH4?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/11795735241271675
there might be something odd going on where oral supplementation of a substance can convince the body to stop making so much of it, but I wouldn't bank on that. also possible that some of us do have BH4 deficiency, and might not know, in which case this yoghurt could help a lot
anyway... I did buy the luvele yogurt maker and osfortis capsules, and have made a few batches now, and I am having migraines for the first time in many many months. so I think I might be in the 'already had too much BH4' category.
the soundtrack to this post has been 'you learn' by alanis morissette. thank you goodnight

 

[Hip]

I would imagine that just taking a Lactobacillus reuteri probiotic capsule would be equivalent to consuming yogurt made with this bacterium.

A typical yogurt contains about 10 million bacteria (CFU) per ml (Ref: 1), so 100 ml of such yogurt would give you about 1 billion bacteria. You usually find more than that amount in a probiotic capsule.




According to this article, the genetic SNPs involved in BH4 production are rs3783641, rs8007267 and rs10483639.

If you click on these SNP links, it will look up which mutations you have on your 23andme results.

Note though that the article says the current 23andMe chip (v5) does not cover these SNPs; but if you got your 23andme results with an older chip, you may have them.

The table below tells you whether your SNPs might lead to reduced BH4 production:

SNP	Normal BH4 Production	Somewhat Reduced BH4 Production	Reduced BH4 Production
rs3783641	T/T	A/T	A/A
rs8007267	C/C	C/T	T/T
rs10483639	G/G	C/G	C/C

I checked my BH4 SNPs on 23andme, and mine are all normal.

 

[BrightCandle]

I would imagine that just taking a Lactobacillus reuteri probiotic capsule would be equivalent to consuming yogurt made with this bacterium.

This recipe matches that in supergut for this strain and 36 hours of fermenting is beyond normal for yoghurt (which is usually only 8 hours) and the claim in the book is this produces about 100 billion CFUs for about 100ml of yoghurt.

 

[Hip]

This recipe matches that in supergut for this strain and 36 hours of fermenting is beyond normal for yoghurt (which is usually only 8 hours) and the claim in the book is this produces about 100 billion CFUs for about 100ml of yoghurt.

I was wondering whether the yogurt recipe in the above pdf might produce higher densities of bacteria, like the high yield inulin-based yogurt recipe you detailed in this post. But the pdf says do not use inulin. Instead they use glucose.

But maybe glucose results in a high yield too?

If this glucose recipe does result in around 100 billion CFU per 100 ml of yogurt, then it would be stronger than probiotic capsules.

 

[BrightCandle]

I was wondering whether the yogurt recipe in the above pdf might produce higher densities of bacteria, like the high yield inulin-based yogurt recipe you detailed in this post. But the pdf says do not use inulin. Instead they use glucose.

But maybe glucose results in a high yield too?

If this glucose recipe does result in around 100 billion CFU per 100 ml of yogurt, then it would be stronger than probiotic capsules.

I had a lot of issues with Inulin splitting the yoghurt and I tried Dextrose and it worked a lot better. Glucose in general seems to work better with L Reuteri in my experience. How it impacts the amount of bacteria I am not sure, I doubt it does much because if it all runs out of food and dies you know about it. Its mostly a factor of time with abundant food available although perhaps glucose is more or less food than Inulin.

 

[Hip]

I just heard from an ME/CFS patient on another forum that Ron Davis told him me about Lactobacillus reuteri. Ron said that it would only work for a small minority, and this is also the small minority that would benefit from the BH4 drug Kuvan.

 

[eebee]

This is the relevant paragraph from Supergut about longer fermentation times yielding higher CFU counts

In addition to choosing specific microbes, we also super-power traditional yogurt-making methods by prolonging fermentation times and adding prebiotic fibers to nourish the hardworking bacteria. These additional efforts increase bacterial counts from the few millions in conventional yogurts to hundreds of billions, not uncommonly a thousand-fold increase. In general, the higher the bacterial count, the greater the biological effect. I have submitted a number of samples of our yogurts for bacterial counts to labs that use an automated method called flow cytometry. The most recently submitted batch of L. reuteri yogurt, for instance, had 262 billion microbes per half-cup serving—try getting those numbers in a commercial yogurt or probiotic supplement.

There's also the cost factor with making yogurt rather than just taking capsules, as you can use previous batches to inoculate new ones, rather than being stuck buying probiotics over and over.
It's good to know that 23andme tests can tell whether you have that gene, otherwise I imagine the testing would be very difficult to access for most people.