Probiotics

For 25 years, Jeffrey Roberts, a technology consultant in Toronto, battled frequent diarrhea and abdominal pain. Roberts, who suffers from irritable bowel syndrome, was unable to attend his children's soccer games and often had to cancel or postpone family vacations. "I'd hold my family back because I'd have a lot of discomfort," he says. But three years ago, he started taking a powdered drink mix that contains eight strains of probiotic bacteria. "It dramatically changed my symptoms," he says.

I receive a lot of ads in the mail for Flora Source, a probiotic. Will it do everything the ads claim? PEARL \o7Wildomar \f7The product: If our bodies ran by majority rule, we'd all be slaves to bacteria. By some estimates, the average digestive tract contains 750 trillion bacteria -- enough to outnumber the human cells in your entire body by about 7 to 1.

Probiotics in yogurt, some other dairy products and supplements contain "good bugs," live microbes that can improve digestion and ease disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and even some cancers. But scientists haven't known exactly how these live microbes work and have worried that some probiotics might pose a danger to infants and those with compromised immune systems.