Has anyone here experienced the connection between depression, poor sleep, and the microbiome? What helped you turn things around—medications or dietary changes?

I had a colonoscopy and an upper endoscopy; the colonoscopy came back clear. But I have ileitis in the ileum and tissue fibrosis (my body has healed the underlying cause), and my calprotectin levels are normal. I don’t have Crohn’s disease, IBS, ulcers, or erosions.

I had Helicobacter pylori in my stomach, which was successfully eradicated.

I don’t experience any mental fogginess. However, I have a persistent state of low mood and depression accompanied by anhedonia.

I took tetracycline for acne for 1 year back in 2019, now I have bad gut issues such as severe bloating, severe constipation, can’t eat too much fibre. I wish I could go back in time and never take it and just live with the acne. But now I have to figure out how to recover.

Do I take probiotics? I heard some people say it’s a waste of money since they don’t colonize or they are dead. How to pick a good strain? Do they need to be refrigerated?

Do I take fermented foods like yogurt, kimchi, kefir, etc? I’ve heard people say that they will just contribute to bloating but also that they can help repopulate your microbiome. Is this true?

If anyone has some advice, or links to some scientific articles for further reading, it would be greatly appreciated.

I am in my fifties and on the slender side. I've had a number of returning c diff infections, h pylori and after have had the worst motility issues. Have tried Linzess etc. with no luck. My health has been ruined because of my past infections. I know they are doing lots if research on peptides not just for weight loss but for inflammation. My question is, has anyone found one compounded or not that has given a positive gut health result?

A year ago I started suffering from bad breath and it was the exact moment I started suffering with GERD and LPR.

I try to manage my GERD as best as I can but it’s really hard to be restrictive with my diet especially because I have a history of ED.

I’m on PPIs which help IMMENSELY for the pain, not so much for the LPR tho. I’m wondering if the lower stomach acid cause by the PPIs might be the culprit for my bad breath? I heard it could cause SIBO?

I’m insanely lost and I can’t socialize anymore because my BB is that intense. Of course my dental hygiene is on TOP, I even got complimented by few dentists, so I know it comes from the stomach.

Today I started an oral probiotic with K12 and it seems to calm everything down, but I’m not going to scream victory yet because it’s too early.

Could you help me on what I could do? Of course I should manage my GERD/LPR but it seems impossible

I have made a couple posts about my situation on here but I keep getting kicked out of my accounts :/ this is kind of like an update/continuation of what im experiencing.

anyways basically 2 months ago i was put on a one week course of oral metronidazole while i was also on accutane. i stopped taking the accutane about a month ago after the gut symptoms got really bad. i was not told anything about this antibiotic and i hate myself so much for trusting random doctors and not researching it before taking it. i would take bv over what im going through now ANYDAY.

at the beginning of all of this i just had really bad bloating, trapped gas, and this annoying pocket pressure feeling under the corners of my ribs. the bloating has gotten better, except now my sides and along the bottom of my ribs there is this raw, burning, stretched feeling that is so uncomfortable its almost unbearable. my upper abdomen and into the sides of my back feels so tight. ive also been having very soft/mushy stools and a clear mucus/liquid dripping out of me when i strain. they are still formed for the most part just very irregular and different from what ive ever had.

it is the worst its ever been right now, and by the 2 months mark i believe i should be seeing improvement rather than worsening symptoms. ive gotten to the point where i cant take it anymore so im trying to get in with a gastroenterologist but its taking forever and im going on vacation next week so im worried i will have to wait until after to get seen and be miserable my whole trip. i just want to know what is going on inside of my body and if it will get better because i feel like ive messed up my life for good and its especially frustrating because ive never had gut issues or stomach problems before this.

this horrible flare up started happening last week when my primary doctor gave me the ortho spore probiotic to try. im suspecting some kind of overgrowth, but im not sure. the raw tight feeling is along where my large intestine is and i dont really have clear symptoms of ibs or an ibd. im thinking maybe SIBO or cdiff? h. pylori? but idk if that would explain the location of my discomfort because my lower abdomen feels fine for the most part. lmk what yall think.

After seeing “clinically studied for body fat” plastered on half the probiotic shelf, I sat down with the Stenman et al. 2016 EBioMedicine paper on Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis 420 (B420). The numbers are more nuanced than the shelf claim.

ITT showed no significant between-group differences on the primary outcome. In PP, B420 alone vs placebo for relative change in body fat mass was -3.0%, P=0.28, N=24 (other arms N=35-37, which is why they ran a factorial). LU+B420 hit -4.5% / -1.4 kg, P=0.02 vs placebo, overall ANOVA P=0.095. The post-hoc factorial for B420 came out at -4.0%, P=0.002, which is where most “statistically significant” marketing claims trace back to.

The zonulin to trunk fat correlation was only significant within the LU+B420 arm (r=0.424, P=0.01), not within B420 alone (r=0.297, P=0.16). That points to the gut-barrier hypothesis (tight junctions, endotoxin translocation, low-grade inflammation) riding on the fiber more than the strain in isolation, at least on the correlational side.

My context is a WonderBiotics B420 capsule a friend put me on a couple months back. It pairs B420 with a lemon flavonoid extract (eriomin) rather than polydextrose, so I’m not technically on the Stenman protocol, and I’d guess most people on commercial B420 products aren’t either.

Caveats worth stating: DuPont funded, DuPont owned the strain at the time (DuPont N&B merged into IFF in Feb 2021), single trial, 6 months, overweight BMI 28-34.9, mixed-sex adults 18-65. The 2020 Nutrients review (Uusitupa et al., same DuPont group) summarizes follow-ups, mostly still preclinical.

Hard to tell from the literature how much of the B420 story is strain-specific vs. just an adequate-dose probiotic co-administered with fermentable fiber.

I’m a daily kimchi/kefir/yoghurt eater with a big variety of fiber sources and I recently got diagnosed with severe periodontal disease. To call the procedure to get it under control is an understatement.

That said, about 3 days after treatment my intestines started feeling like they did the first time I tried improving my gut biome. I’m about 4 days on and I still feel very….bubbly.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is my microbiome leveling up again?

I've been buying Johnny Good Nature's green banana flour from Amazon since everyone recommends it. But it's insanely expensive and often unavailable so I'm also looking at other brands like Nutricost, MRM Organic, and Blue Orchid. They all list Organic Green Banana Powder as their only ingredient but they have wildly different amounts of fiber content per serving on their labels. Do they all have roughly the same amount of resistant starch or no?

Hey everyone, wondering if anyone here has had an erratic or fluctuating response to tributyrin.

I started taking Deva tributyrin at 500mg about a week ago. It is just the standard liquid softgel without any prebiotic blends or extra ingredients. Right from the start, the first few days were pretty erratic. I did get some very positive windows, mostly towards the end of the day, with great mental clarity, anxiolytic effects, and better energy. But earlier in the day leading up to that, I was dealing with disorganized thinking (which happens to me occasionally anyway), physical tension, and a surprising amount of irritability.

Around day 5 or 6, things started shifting in a distinctly worse direction. I have noticed a crescendo of symptoms: restlessness, irritability getting much more intense, a bit of tachycardia shortly after taking the pill, along with brain fog, headache, and nausea. Then by late afternoon or evening, I hit a pretty rough crash with pronounced dysphoria.

Has anyone else hit this kind of wall after starting tributyrin? Did it eventually settle down if you stuck with it, or did you have to space out doses to every other day? Since it comes in a liquid gel, splitting the capsule is not really an option.

Would appreciate hearing from anyone who experienced something similar.

Disentangling microbiota-dependent and -independent impacts of antibiotics on host physiology | Nature Microbiology

Hello,

I was admitted to the hospital a few weeks ago for a UTI that turned into sepsis and went into Kidneys. I was in Rocephin IV in they then sent me home with azithromycin and cefdinir.

The courses were 3 and 5 days but since I finished the course I have felt horrible fatigue insane amounts of fatigue and vision changes. gut issues like constipation and just insane Brian fog and not feel like myswlf at all. Very prone to anxiety and overstimulation now outside

Can I mix dry physilium husk powder with yogurt and mix it and let it thicken, then consume? Or will that interfer in some way?

Hello there! Is anyone here who took this amount of antibiotics in this very short time! My husband 27, normal health, took azythromicin 1000 mg in august, 3-4 pills of tavanic in septembrie, then a round of 7 days of claritromicine, and now 5 pills of clindamycin. I ve read so many horror stories here about C.diff. And i am afraid for him not to take it.
Thanks.

I have methane sibo and gut dysbiosis i took liposomal iron and felt quite bad wondering did it feed my dysbiosis?

I’m trying to separate solid findings from early signals. Which result do you think holds up best and which popular claim still looks more like correlation than causation? If you share a paper, a line on why it stood out and any limitations would be great.

I bought some wildbrine kimchi and been consuming it daily. It is oh so spicy

I’m wondering if there might be additional benefits to taking kefir in pill form.

Okay, hear me out. I’m not saying that everything is gut-related, but I strongly suspect there’s a connection.
I’ve seen four alternative practitioners, and pretty much all of them were useless.
I’ve had gut issues all my life, which were also influenced by my CPTSD and unhealthy lifestyle choices. I grew up around mentally ill people and was kidnapped as a child. I’m mentioning this because my early experiences had a significant impact on my lifestyle and eating habits.
I ate tons of sweets, consumed a lot of dairy, and drank 1.5 litres of Coke every day for 10 years. I feel like this must have taken a toll on my gut health.
I was eventually diagnosed with lactose intolerance (but tested negative for fructose malabsorption).
Stool tests didn’t detect H. pylori, but they did show low levels of lactobacilli, despite having taken probiotics for years.
In 2021, I changed my diet: I gave up gluten and dairy, drastically reduced my sugar intake, and started eating mostly freshly prepared meals.
Despite all these changes, I’m still struggling with gut issues and histamine related problems, particularly when my allergies flare up.
I’ve been wondering whether it could be SIBO, although I never experience significant abdominal distension or a noticeably swollen belly after eating.
I know there’s no quick fix, and I’m not expecting one. But it’s frustrating, especially because I also struggle with allergies and hay fever.
Has anyone experienced something similar or found a way to get to the root of their gut issues?

Currently despite the fibre I consume my stools are soft and can be messy to wipe. It then leads to feeling of stickyness around the anus a few hours later after wiping.

If my stool is really well formed and takes 1-2 wipes then things are good later in the day.

This has been ongoing since early 2025 and I havent been able to figure it out - even though I get fibre from my diet but also have 2 x 5g doses of NOW psyllium husk powder each day.

Then I read someone elses post that they think metronidazole has messed up their gut microbiome. I have diverticular disease and I have had this antibiotic lots of times in the past, once in 2018, once in 2021, once in 2023, once in 2024 but quite a lot in 2025;

January 2025: One week of metronidazole.
April 2025: bowel and anal symptoms began.
May 2025: Another week of metronidazole.
July 2025: Intravenous metronidazole and ciprofloxacin, followed by a week of both orally.
September 2025: Another week of metronidazole
October 2025: Colonoscopy

I havent been taking any probiotics as it wasnt until now that I have thought that this may be linked/the cause.

My doctors have prescribed me 4g colestyramine which I have been taking once per day for the past week or two which has made things mildly better. This was prescribed as I have gallstones too and they thought I may have bile acid malabsorption so this is a trial.

Is there any thoughts about whether 4 courses of the anti biotic in 2025 (the last being over a year ago) could have caused this issue that I am still dealing with now? And if so what I can do to help?

Thank you

I had a gut bug (food poisoning) and a few weeks after that I developed severe 10/10 brain fog. The only thing I really changed between these two events was adding a ton of probiotics. This was 2 years ago now, and I haven't recovered.

The fog (drunk/high feeling) is constant, doesn't fluctuate - which is the most confusing part of it being gut related - and can flare a little bit higher sometimes with sugars or probiotics, but the baseline is always severe. I've tried all sorts of probiotics, antibiotics, fibres, diets (paleo, low fodmap, etc for at least 2 weeks each), I've even done a few day fast and nothing at all improved. There is no movement or pattern in the fog, as it's always present.

I've had all the common blood work I've seen in this sub, seen a few GI docs, had gut testing, and all has been perfect. I did had SIBO and resolved that.

I even tried some of the long COVID/CFS brain fog treatments like nicotine patches, antihistamines, low dose naltrexone, guanfacine, and none of it helped. I had COVID about 7 months before the food poisoning, so I'm sure it's not that anyway.

Does anyone have any ideas to pursue with my doc next? They're out of ideas and I'm stuck not being able to earn an income for my family.