Base Knowledge: Probiotics, Prebiotics, and all the other Biotics
Can managing you gut bacteria make you a better athlete? Let's find out!
Probiotics are tiny bugs you eat to support other tiny bugs that live in your intestines. There are good and bad bugs down there. Probiotics help the good ones.
Prebiotics are types of fiber that the good tiny bugs like to eat, so when you consume it, they prosper.
There’s no solid science directly linking probiotics and prebiotics to athletic performance. However, there’s plenty of science showing probiotics and prebiotic may help with bodily functions ancillary to athletic performance, so probiotics are probably beneficial to athletes indirectly.
That’s the fifty-cent explanation that (some of) you paid for. Now, let’s peel back a layer of the onion—a vegetable packed with prebiotics, by the way—to learn more.
Probiotics
Your gut is filled with roughly 40 trillion microbes of countless variety, some good and some bad, all fighting for space down there. Putting this in perspective, New York City has roughly 8.5 million inhabitants, many of whom fight over housing every year. Imagine competing against 39,999,999,999,999 other hipsters for a Manhattan brownstone.
These bugs don’t just help you digest food. They have their little pilus thumbs in countless bodily functions—even ones involving your brain. The issues impacted by your gut microbiome include several that athletes struggle with in particular, including immunity, inflammation, and oxidative stress.
The idea that little animals in your intestines impact your entire body may sound like voodoo science, but it’s actually pretty logical. For example, when some gut bacteria breakdown prebiotic fiber, one of the byproducts is short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs)—an anti-inflammatory substance that we don’t otherwise get in our diet.
In other words, it’s not the bugs that benefit you as much as their waste—so next time you get grossed out at your dog for eating cat poop, just remember what’s going on in your own intestines.
Consuming probiotics gets tricky. They can be fragile little bastards, so they might be DOA in that supplement you’re taking. If a probiotic supplement gives instructions to refrigerate, don’t ignore that. In fact, I’d store any probiotic supplement in the fridge, just to be safe.
You can also get probiotics from eating fermented foods, ranging from sauerkraut to kimchi to tempeh to kombucha to raw milk cheese—but if you buy those products pasteurized, the microbes have been killed. Yogurt is an exception because they pasteurize it but then add probiotics back in.
Making your own unpasteurized, fermented foods isn’t difficult. (Check out Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation, a great how-to-ferment guide.) Obviously, there are inherent risks to fermented foods because there’s a chance you’ll also propagate bad bacteria, molds, and fungi. I tell you this mostly as a CYA; I make my own sauerkraut and kombucha and it’s never done me wrong.
And when I’m in France, I eat unpasteurized cheese. It took a few cases of Napoleon’s Revenge for my gut to consistently respond favorably to the bacterial onslaught that comes with unpasteurized Gallic dairy, but it was worth the ordeal—because French cheese.
Another downside of fermented foods is that you tend not to know exactly which probiotics you’re getting and in what amount. Specific probiotics play specific roles in the body. If you have a specific need, you might want to focus on a specific probiotic. Personally, I’m not into bacterial micromanagement and I feel my body, especially my immune system, benefits from the variety of fermented foods I consume on the regular.
Prebiotics
Fiber contains carbohydrates so complex that humans can’t digest them. Some fiber just pushes right through, sweeping stuff out and adding bulk to your stool. However, the bacteria in our gut can digest some of it, creating beneficial byproducts like SCFAs. This type of fiber is often referred to as prebiotics.
You may have heard of inulin, pectin, or oligosaccharides. These are all prebiotics. If you eat a bunch of produce, you’ll probably end up eating a bunch of prebiotics, but a few fruits and veggies of prebiotic note are apples, garlic, onions, underripe bananas, and oatmeal.
Synbiotics
Synbiotics are combination of probiotics and prebiotics, the idea being that the latter feeds the former, creating a synergistic effect. While some people claim foods like kimchi and sauerkraut are synbiotic, the supplement industry considers something synbiotic only if the prebiotic involved specifically feeds the probiotic involved. Yes, even a bacterium can be a picky eater.
If you want to learn more, here’s an article I wrote on synbiotics for Natural Products Insider.
Postbiotics
These are those byproducts I keep harping about. In addition to SCFAs, your gut bacteria produce vitamin B12, K, and a bunch of amino acids that help with immunity.
The idea with eating postbiotics is that you skip right to the beneficial punch.
Paraprobiotics/parabiotics
Paraprobiotics are dead probiotics that, somehow, still produce the benefits of living probiotics. You may grimace at this, but most things you eat are deceased, so why not add bacteria to the list?
The benefit of consuming paraprobiotics is that you can work around all that food safety stuff I mentioned earlier. People with weak immune systems who might be sidelined by tainted fermented foods can safely eat dead bacteria.
At this point, the science is pretty new on paraprobiotics, so I don’t have much to report.
Do probiotics et al. help athletes?
The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics are not currently known to directly impact performance. That is to say, they don’t directly make you go faster, longer, or harder like caffeine or creatine. However, they do help with a number of health-related issues that tend to impact people who exercise a lot. I’m specifically talking about immunity, which decreases when you train super hard; oxidative stress, which increases when you train super hard; and gastro-intestinal issues, which also increase when you train super hard.
A 2021 systematic review of all research on the topic from the last five years concluded that “probiotics could indirectly influence sports performance by improving other parameters,” including the issues I just mentioned.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand on Probiotics basically agrees with this and takes it a step further. The paper suggests probiotics may also play a role in improving muscle mass, managing cortisol and testosterone, and helping with cognitive issues—but that more research is required.
It’s pretty obvious that probiotics—and all the other biotics that trail behind them—are beneficial to human health. So, while I don’t think you need to add them to your performance stack, you should certainly add them to your general health stack. Fork out some dough for a solid, scientifically-proven pro/prebiotic supplement.
If you’re looking for a recommendation, I know a bunch of the scientists at Ritual—so I’d trust their Synbiotic+ supplement.
Better still, live on the edge like me and get your prebiotics through fruits and veggies and your probiotics through fermented foods because—to repeat—French cheese.