Don't trust and check
Most of the information about probiotics on the Internet turned out to be unreliable
Polina Gershberg, Naked Science
The authors of an article published in Frontiers in Medicine (Neunez et al., Online Information on Probiotics: Does It Match Scientific Evidence?) warn of an Internet wave of unsubstantiated and unsubstantiated information about probiotics obtained from commercial sources.
Although today Google's algorithms sort the most reliable websites at the top of the list when issuing on request, you should not trust Big Brother in the field of probiotics. Scientists from the Medical School of Brighton and Sussex, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Brussels, evaluated the first 150 web pages that appeared as a result of a Google search for "probiotics", in which their origin and the mentioned diseases were recorded.
Then, the information posted on each of them about diseases that are allegedly treated or relieved with the help of these supplements, the authors of the article checked with scientific data and the results of reliable studies. For verification, they used the Cochrane Library, a repository of clinical trial data and the results of meta–analyses of evidence-based medicine.
Probiotics are cultures of living microorganisms that can be beneficial to health. In different countries, the regulation of the turnover of these drugs occurs with varying degrees of rigor, and, remarkably, the more loyal the legislation, the more excellent properties manufacturers promise and the more active sales are. Where the requirements are stricter, the market is often expanded by online trading.
"Most of the web pages with information about probiotics come from commercial sources or news agencies, but they provide the least complete information, not to mention potential side effects or regulatory issues. We also find that many websites refer to the benefits of probiotics in diseases for which there is not a lot of high-level scientific data, except for studies on mice," writes one of the authors of the article, Professor Pietro Ghezzi. At the same time, of course, it was stated about the probiotic benefits of diseases in humans.
There are absolutely no or poorly proven claims about the benefits of probiotics on the studied sites more than moderately or reliably proven ones. Figure from the article by Neunez et al. – VM.
How is it dangerous? Clinical trials of any drug must go through all phases of research to the end. No model animal is able to give exhaustive answers to questions about how exactly the drug will affect a person. The numerous differences between us and animals require accurate data based on research with the help of human volunteers.
Moreover, modern data suggest that at this stage it is important to observe the representativeness of the sample: gender, age, race, genetic and other diseases can greatly change the results. There are no "harmless" drugs: everything we take must be reliably tested, and the method of "asking what helped my neighbor" can sometimes be deadly.
Scientists note that the huge volume of commercial information negates the laudable efforts of the search engine, which has very strict criteria for ranking health-related sites.
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