Heavy doses of probiotic?

I recently posted about the radiolab episode "Guts", which mentioned that when given huge doses of probiotics, both mice and humans experienced a more relaxed, calm mental state.

I found that intriguing. Im certain my uc is related to my emotional/mental state, at least in part. So, Im wondering, if one were to dose themselves pretty highly with probiotics, what is the best quality brand that one could obtain affordably? My natural foods store carries one that is essentially a little cup of yogurt-like stuff, but theyre about $5 each... They seem "better" to me as they are a refrigerated, liquid brand. I cant help but wonder how many effective organisms can really be living in a dry pill at room temp.

Probiotics are very hit and miss for all of us as regards tolerability. For example, I simply do better by avoiding either of the dairy based homemade probiotics- homemade yogurt or homemade kefir. However, if one can tolerate either or both, those are, bang for the buck, the most effective, affordable way to ingest lots of colony forming units.

I happen to believe in "the more the merrier" approach in terms of probiotic strains (provided that I tolerate them- that requires trial and error one by one) so I take a very wide variety of probiotics- eg currently I have on hand and take: VSL-3 capsules (the starch etc in the powder is an issue for me); Thorne s. Boulardi; primal defense Powder; culturelle: and critical colon bifidomax 80 billion cfu/capsule.

I try and vet probiotics via some independent combo. of evidence based studies e g on pubmed, and anecdotal reports from forums. Then I trial and error them. Mutaflor and VSL3 are examples with peer reviewed articles. That often just means they has funding to publish studies, but its a start.

I noticed the prescript assist has prebiotic.. I was taking one of those (name is escaping me at the moment) and I cant say it helped much...

I think I read on here recently that prebiotics can fuel bad bacteria also...?

Prebiotics are VERY individually tolerated. I notice that all probiotucs that contain prebiotics, thus far anyway, make me flare. They certainly create some gas- alone rhat is tolerable perhaps but for some of us it takes it to the flare level.