Any striking marketing claims in companies’ ads about the gut benefits of a popular probiotic may be full of, well, the same thing that has their target audience backed up.
In a randomized controlled trial, the probiotic Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis—used in many probiotic products, including Dannon’s Activia yogurts—did nothing to improve bowel health in people with constipation, according to data from a randomized triple-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.
The study adds to a mixed and mostly unconvincing body of scientific literature on the bowel benefits of the bacterium, substrains of which are sometimes sold with faux scientific-sounding names in products. Dannon, for instance, previously marketed its substrain, DN-173 010, as “Bifidus regularis.”
