Becoming an Equol Producer

I posted this over at the hairlosshelp forum, but realized this would be a good place to discuss it too. Just want to get the word out to all those who are trying the equol route and possibly pick up some research collaborators along the way.

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Original post:

I've done some looking around these forums and I'm very surprised no one has put this information out there yet...so I thought I would pass it on. This is in addition to the usual green tea/seaweed info about boosting equol production. Anyone who has looked into equol has heard those a million times.

1. Equol: history, chemistry, and formation

www.snij.jp/xoops/download_files/paper20101206-9.pdf

Lists all the bacteria that have been shown to convert diadzein to equol. Two important (available) ones are:

Bifidobacterium, specifically Bifidobacterium animalis
Entercoccus faecium

The first can be found in all kinds of probiotic supplements. I am still looking for citations to see if specific strains are able to produce equol. The cited papers claiming bifidobacterium produces equol specifically left the strains out due to conflict of interest. One popular strain can be found in dannon activa. It could be that all strains of b animalis produce equol. Anyone have a research paper link with info on this?

The second of which can be bought at PETCO. Its called benebac.

http://www.drugs.com/vet/bene-bac-powder.html

Dont want to take bunny probiotics, thats OK, You can get your dose of Entercoccus faecium from eating miso paste, don't heat it too hot or you will kill the bacteria. Good to try multiple sources from different manufacturers, some may have more bacteria than others, best would be imported from Japan. Make sure yours is not pasteurized or contains alcohol, read the following link for more info if you're interested.

"It is clear that the enterococcal strains in Miso-paste from the present study belong to the Ent. faecium`species group'."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...672.2002.01573.x/full

2. EQUOL LEVEL REGULATOR

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20237913

It was likely the above research paper that inspired the following patent:

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090253643

The basic idea is that different kinds of carbohydrates (food for bacteria) present allow the right kind of equol producing bacteria to either thrive or die off.

The important (available, safe) carbohydrates to ingest and avoid:

Ingest:

Inositol - member of the b-vitamins (Myo-inositol)
Sorbitol - widely available sweetener

Interesting to note, Inositol has been listed in its own right as a hair loss supplement, with no mention to equol. I wonder if the effects people have seen are related to equol. It is also known to remove fats from the liver! Could be acting in different ways to achieve the same effect. And don't overdo it with the sorbitol, it has been known to aggravate IBS in some people.

Avoid:

FOS, inulin, GOS, lactose, glucose, sucrose

Scary the first two are found in all sorts of probiotic supplements. Those last two will be hard to avoid, but always good advice to limit sugar intake. We should all know this already.

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As always, do your own research before trying anything. My career is research based (of a different field though), so I consider myself pretty good at digging around, but it has taken me months to come across this information. Now that I've shared it, I hope to see people including it with the usual seaweed/green tea info on equol. I'm most excited about the Inositol discovery since it could have multiple pathways of action in treating hairloss (anyone have a paper to cite on this?).

Let me know what you think or if you have something to contribute! Anyone who wants to try and document success with this kind of thing, that would be great, but it can be hard since there's so many other things to try!

More info:

https://immortalhair.forumotion.com/t2982-equol-why-hasnt-this-been-focused-on-more