Is a lot of probiotics the same as FMT? Anyone try VSL 3? I’m trying a high dose (around 230 billion CFU daily)
- Thread starter Prodigyev
- Start date
Michael Harrop
Well-known member
Not even close. Probiotics can be, and often are, highly disruptive. https://humanmicrobiome.info/probiotic-guide/
In large part, the opposite of FMT.
- Thread Starter
- #3
Ok…..well, I guess I’ll use my brothers stool, as I have no other option. I don’t have a lot of money to buy from a high quality donor at some hospital.
He is below 30, in decent health, and has good poop (type 3 and 4 on the Bristol stool chart). I’m so bad, I’ll literally just do anything at this point.
And FMT might not even restore my gut?? Man I’m really scared….
I’m in such bad health.
Michael Harrop
Well-known member
If you take FMT that lackadaisically, you're likely to get worse. What you listed is not how you select & screen a donor.
https://humanmicrobiome.info/fmt/
This does not exist.
- Thread Starter
- #5
There isn’t getting much worse man. I can’t live properly. If I stay like this much longer, the gut inflammation will almost certainly begin to cause cancers and what not.
I’ll just have to use my brother who seems like a decently healthy guy. I’ll probably document how it goes. I’m cooked bro lmaoo
Chavanco
New member
Trust me, I'm in the same situasjon as you. FMT is my last and only hope, before eventually putting an end to this suffering.
Chavanco
New member
The probiotic I had some-what effect from was L.reuteri. However it obviously was no cure, maybe I felt 3-4% better overall. Make sure it does not contain any oligosaccharides (FOS).
If you're suffering from some autoimmune condition you can somewhat manage your symptoms through diet. You just have to figure out what food you can't tolerate.
The easiest way to do that is through an elimination diet. For example you can try just eating plain chicken and rice for a day (low histamine, oxolates, fibre etc in chicken and rice, but no guarantees that you'll be able to tolerate it). If that makes you feel better you start adding other food back into your diet one item at a time until you get a bad reaction. That way you'll know what food you're intolerant to and you just keep it out of your diet to manage your symptoms.
This is how I manage my own inflammation and it seems to be the best solution until we figure out how to fully correct a dysbiotic gut.
Aim for NaN
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- Oct 27, 2025
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I've taken at least a trillion CFU a day, with no lasting effect. Though, the first time I took probiotics, my digestive system started acting normal. My poop became a perfect type 3 and I was going every day, with incredible urgency without the need for laxatives. (Note, my stools have mostly been type 1, rarely type 2, all my life). And for the first time in my life I was gaining weight without even changing any part of my diet. I was gaining a pound a day. However, that effect ended in a week when I changed probiotic formula. Returning to the previous formula did nothing. I lost all the weight I gained. Whether or not it would have lasted without changing formulas, I'll never know. If it would have stuck, I would have probably been healed. The only thing it consistently does for me now is increase stool frequency. Even among the home-made kefir groups, once they stop consuming kefir, many of them return to how they were, and they have to let it ferment for days to achieve several trillion CFU per serving.
When no one is willing to help you find a stool donor or become your stool donor, you're left with experimenting with everything else. Being in that boat, I've tried just about everything else, and all it does is somewhat help manage my symptoms. And it's expensive to keep it up. But all of this have simply proven to me that an FMT is all that will fix me. Yes, there's a chance that the FMT could make me worse. But without an FMT, I have a 100% chance of death. 50% chance of death is always better than 100%. No point in being scared of death with odds like that. Yet, the knowledge gained is stuff you won't ever find anywhere else. Though, it's kind of fun watching a new study come out confirming what you already knew. Too bad they take forever to confirm it, and the general public could care less.
When no one is willing to help you find a stool donor or become your stool donor, you're left with experimenting with everything else. Being in that boat, I've tried just about everything else, and all it does is somewhat help manage my symptoms. And it's expensive to keep it up. But all of this have simply proven to me that an FMT is all that will fix me. Yes, there's a chance that the FMT could make me worse. But without an FMT, I have a 100% chance of death. 50% chance of death is always better than 100%. No point in being scared of death with odds like that. Yet, the knowledge gained is stuff you won't ever find anywhere else. Though, it's kind of fun watching a new study come out confirming what you already knew. Too bad they take forever to confirm it, and the general public could care less.
Chavanco
New member
What are you even referring to here?
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Michael Harrop
Well-known member
So what are you doing to help make safe & effective donors available?
I see lots of people making statements like that about how bad off they are and how badly they need FMT, yet virtually 100% of them are completely unwilling to lift a finger to help themselves. Most of them use whatever bad donor is most easily available, and get worse.
- Thread Starter
- #12
When do I say autoimmune disease? It’s gut inflammation from horrible dysbiosis
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Chavanco
New member
Probiotics are, at best, a temporary band-aid—not a solution.
What the research actually shows about probiotics:
A 2018 study by Zmora et al. in Cell demonstrated that probiotics in most cases do not colonize the gut mucosa permanently. They found person-specific, strain-specific mucosal colonization patterns, and probiotics induced only a transient, individualized impact on mucosal community structure and gut transcriptome. Benefits disappear when supplementation stops (Zmora et al., 2018, Cell, 174(6):1388-1405.e21).
For people with existing dysbiosis, probiotics can even be counterproductive. A 2018 randomized controlled trial by Suez et al. in Cell found that probiotics delayed gut mucosal microbiome reconstitution and host transcriptome recovery after antibiotics compared to spontaneous recovery, while autologous FMT induced rapid and near-complete recovery (Suez et al., 2018, Cell, 174(6):1406-1423.e16)
"More strains = better" is marketing, not science.
There are no robust clinical data supporting that products with 8, 15, or 30+ strains are more effective than simple formulations. This represents a dose-response fallacy from manufacturers. As noted in probiotic development literature, while multispecies formulations exist, "clinically randomized trials that actually prove their respective efficacy remain scarce" (Freimüller et al., 2020, Frontiers in Microbiology). Strain quality and ecological compatibility matter far more than quantity.
FMT vs. probiotics—fundamentally different:
FMT transfers a complete, functional ecosystem (1000+ species, unknown microbes, bacteriophages, metabolites, immune signals). Probiotics are 3-30 isolated strains in massive doses thrown into an already dysfunctional environment. As Michael Harrop notes—they can be "the opposite of FMT" by disrupting more than helping.
A 2020 network meta-analysis comparing FMT and probiotics (VSL#3) for ulcerative colitis found no statistical difference in clinical remission between FMT and probiotics, but noted that FMT introduces "the characteristics of an overall healthy gut microbiota, providing unique advantages compared to prebiotics and probiotics" (Yao et al., 2020, PLOS ONE).
Another 2024 systematic review confirmed both probiotics and FMT show efficacy for IBS, but FMT "has the characteristics of being effective, easy to perform, and relatively inexpensive" and is "a promising method" (Zhang et al., 2024, Nutrients).
Regarding your situation:
I understand the desperation, but be careful viewing your brother's stool as an easy fix. "Healthy" doesn't mean "good donor"—screening requires extensive testing for parasites (Dientamoeba fragilis, Blastocystis spp., Giardia, Cryptosporidium), pathogenic bacteria (Salmonella, Shigella, Campylobacter, C. difficile, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli), multi-drug resistant organisms (VRE, ESBL, CRE, MRSA), viruses (norovirus, rotavirus, adenovirus, HIV, hepatitis), and metabolic/immune markers (BMI, inflammatory markers, autoimmune history, psychiatric conditions, antibiotic use) (Kazerouni et al., 2020, PLOS ONE; OpenBiome, 2025).
Poor donor selection has made people permanently worse. In 2019, the FDA issued a safety alert after an immunocompromised patient died from ESBL-producing E. coli bacteremia transmitted via insufficiently screened donor stool (FDA Safety Alert, 2019; referenced in Kim et al., 2022, Journal of Clinical Medicine).
Probiotics never worked for me either. That says something about how fundamentally different dysbiosis is from the "digestive issues" the probiotic market is built to "solve."
What the research actually shows about probiotics:
A 2018 study by Zmora et al. in Cell demonstrated that probiotics in most cases do not colonize the gut mucosa permanently. They found person-specific, strain-specific mucosal colonization patterns, and probiotics induced only a transient, individualized impact on mucosal community structure and gut transcriptome. Benefits disappear when supplementation stops (Zmora et al., 2018, Cell, 174(6):1388-1405.e21).
For people with existing dysbiosis, probiotics can even be counterproductive. A 2018 randomized controlled trial by Suez et al. in Cell found that probiotics delayed gut mucosal microbiome reconstitution and host transcriptome recovery after antibiotics compared to spontaneous recovery, while autologous FMT induced rapid and near-complete recovery (Suez et al., 2018, Cell, 174(6):1406-1423.e16)
"More strains = better" is marketing, not science.
There are no robust clinical data supporting that products with 8, 15, or 30+ strains are more effective than simple formulations. This represents a dose-response fallacy from manufacturers. As noted in probiotic development literature, while multispecies formulations exist, "clinically randomized trials that actually prove their respective efficacy remain scarce" (Freimüller et al., 2020, Frontiers in Microbiology). Strain quality and ecological compatibility matter far more than quantity.
FMT vs. probiotics—fundamentally different:
FMT transfers a complete, functional ecosystem (1000+ species, unknown microbes, bacteriophages, metabolites, immune signals). Probiotics are 3-30 isolated strains in massive doses thrown into an already dysfunctional environment. As Michael Harrop notes—they can be "the opposite of FMT" by disrupting more than helping.
A 2020 network meta-analysis comparing FMT and probiotics (VSL#3) for ulcerative colitis found no statistical difference in clinical remission between FMT and probiotics, but noted that FMT introduces "the characteristics of an overall healthy gut microbiota, providing unique advantages compared to prebiotics and probiotics" (Yao et al., 2020, PLOS ONE).
Another 2024 systematic review confirmed both probiotics and FMT show efficacy for IBS, but FMT "has the characteristics of being effective, easy to perform, and relatively inexpensive" and is "a promising method" (Zhang et al., 2024, Nutrients).
Regarding your situation:
I understand the desperation, but be careful viewing your brother's stool as an easy fix. "Healthy" doesn't mean "good donor"—screening requires extensive testing for parasites (Dientamoeba fragilis, Blastocystis spp., Giardia, Cryptosporidium), pathogenic bacteria (Salmonella, Shigella, Campylobacter, C. difficile, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli), multi-drug resistant organisms (VRE, ESBL, CRE, MRSA), viruses (norovirus, rotavirus, adenovirus, HIV, hepatitis), and metabolic/immune markers (BMI, inflammatory markers, autoimmune history, psychiatric conditions, antibiotic use) (Kazerouni et al., 2020, PLOS ONE; OpenBiome, 2025).
Poor donor selection has made people permanently worse. In 2019, the FDA issued a safety alert after an immunocompromised patient died from ESBL-producing E. coli bacteremia transmitted via insufficiently screened donor stool (FDA Safety Alert, 2019; referenced in Kim et al., 2022, Journal of Clinical Medicine).
Probiotics never worked for me either. That says something about how fundamentally different dysbiosis is from the "digestive issues" the probiotic market is built to "solve."
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