Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess whether commercially prepared probiotic products contain viable organisms, as claimed by their manufacturers, particularly whether products labeled as containing Lactobacillus did so. To identify and quantify as many species as feasible and to compare them with the contents listed on labels. DESIGN: Randomized, double-blind trial. SETTING: Community hospital in Chilliwack, BC. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Trial of 10 randomly chosen brands of probiotic preparations bought over-the-counter in British Columbia's lower mainland. Only products claiming to contain lactobacillus were included in this study. Viable organisms in each probiotic brand and quantities of Lactobacillus in each product. RESULTS: None of the 10 products tested matched their labeled microbiologic specifications. Two brands grew nothing aerobically or anaerobically. No Lactobacillus grew in five brands, although their labels stated that this was the main species. Eight brands contained viable cells, but only 10% of the number stated by their manufacturers. CONCLUSION: Most product labels did not adequately identify or quantify microbes. Use of probiotics should not be recommended at this time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.032 | 0.210 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".