Summary: This week in our Ask the RD podcast, we’re answering not one but two separate questions! We sincerely appreciate everyone submitting their great questions. Laura and Kelsey will be addressing the following topics in this podcast: Should I take probiotics on an empty stomach or with a meal? What do you think about the “eating for your blood type” diet? Links discussed: The impact of meals on a probiotic during transit through a model of the human upper gastrointestinal tract. Blood type diets lack supporting evidence: a systematic review. Probiotic chart ($15 for purchase, but lots of free resources too!) ABO Genotype, ‘Blood-Type’ Diet and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors (Published in 2014) TRANSCRIPT Thanks to Noelle Kahne for volunteering to transcribe this week’s podcast. LAURA: Hi everyone, welcome to this week’s episode of Ask the RD. I’m Laura; I’m a graduate student at UNC Chapel Hill studying public health and nutrition and I’ll have my RD at the end of 2013. KELSEY: And I’m Kelsey, a registered dietitian specializing in whole food, ancestral diets, and I’m working on my master’s in nutrition and functional medicine. LAURA: Thanks for joining us for this week’s Ask the RD podcast. We’re excited to be here and we hope that you’ll enjoy learning about nutrition-related topics. Remember to submit your nutrition-related questions through the online submission form, which we’ve linked to on Chris’s site. We’ll be answering your questions on the show, so feel free to submit as many as you want. As a reminder to everyone this is just general advice and should NOT be used in place of medical advice from a licensed professional. So let’s get started with our podcast. Kelsey, I think the first question that we have is for you. KELSEY: All right. LAURA: Should I take probiotics on an empty stomach, or with food? KELSEY: Excellent question. So first, I just want to talk a little bit about probiotic supplements in general and then move on to the crux of the question because I think a little bit of background information is useful here. First, it’s really important to think about probiotics in terms of what strains you’re introducing. And when I say strain I don’t just mean Lactobacillus acidophilus, I mean Lactobacillus acidophilus LA-5. That third letter number or name is really important. Just saying Lactobacillus acidophilus is just like saying ‘dog’, but what we’re looking for is the particular breed of dog, which would be equivalent to that strain of bacteria. And, the point being that we’re looking for something more specific. So once you know the actual strain of bacteria, you can look at research on it to see it’s survival in the gut, and it’s specific effects on body systems. The reason I bring this up is because if you buy a supplement that doesn’t specify that strain of bacteria, you really have no idea what the supplement is going to do because different strains have completely different effects on the body and completely different survival through the gastro-intestinal tract. So I really only recommend supplement companies that are willing to disclose which strains their products contain, because that means that they did the research, saw that those are really good strains to be using, that they’ve survived through the GI tract, and they’re being used for a particular purpose, and put them in a product. So if a supplement company doesn’t disclose that information, to me that means that either they don’t know that strain is important, or they know it’s important and they don’t put the best strain in or most researched strain in order to keep the price down. So they’ll use just a general lactobacillus acidophilus strain that they don’t even know what it is because it’s cheaper than lactobacillus acidophilus LA-5 or some well-researched strain. Either way, you know, whether they don’t know it’s important or they know it’s important and choose not to put it in there,
