Bifidobacterium infantis 35624 - What's our view?

We watched the Channel 4 programme "Food Hospital" where Bifidobacterium infantis 35624 was used sucessfully to help relieve symptoms of IBS, and wanted to find out more. It seems that this "branded" strain is used in the Procter and Gamble product Align®, recently put on the market in the UK. So what's our view? 

It's great to see that big companies are making investments in research behind probiotics, and the study done by P Worrell at Manchester will certainly have been done well. What's interesting for us is that the forumulation uses microencapsulation; something my husband and I have alot of knowledge about (see our consultancy business Burgundy Gold Ltd)..... we assume this technology is being used in this product to protect the bacteria from stomach and other digestive enzymes, so that it can get to the lower gut, where IBS occurs, which will have substantially helped the research show positive results. 

So why don't we stock it? Well, as it is marketed by P&G it is a lot harder and more costly for us as a small retailer to get hold of it, and if we do there will be little profit to us for selling it. Equally we stock other very good, researched probiotics such as VSL#3 and Probion, which our customers confirm work very well. Probion is encapsulated like Align® so is deisgned to get to the lower gut in the same way.

Let's hope P&G and the others continue with the expensive research, so that we can all become more confident of the science behind what we know works for us as individuals... and take our probiotics knowing we are not wasting our money!