2020 Review: Garden of Life Probiotics Primal Defense vs RAW

[toc]Many probiotics you buy today are a total waste of money, because they contain little (if any) living organisms.

Below we show you how to tell if your probiotics are working or not, regardless of which brand they are. You don’t need lab test results to find out.

In fact, you probably already have the supplies in your kitchen to test if they’re alive!

Given our positive experience over the years with Garden of Life vitamins and supplements, we were anxious to try a bottle of their Primal Defense Ultimate Ultra (isn’t that name a mouthful).

After all, we’ve had great experiences with their vegan protein blends and figured they could also be trusted for this product.

We chose Primal Defense for our testing because it is the mid-tier in the offerings from Garden of Life.

Their most expensive are the RAW brand, especially their highest potency which is the RAW Ultimate Care 100 billion CFU. They also have the Dr. Formulated Mood Plus, once daily, etc. which are slightly cheaper.

How we tested Garden of Life

…and how you can test it, too!

If you haven’t heard, there is actually an old-fashioned way how to test if probiotics are active from the comfort of your own home. Laboratory equipment isn’t needed!

Not only is it easy to do, but also cheap and relatively quick – 24 hours should be enough time.

It’s called the probiotic milk test. How you do it is quite simple. The supplies are pretty basic.

Step 1: Take 2 equal-size glasses

Glasses, cups, whatever. Just about any two containers of the same size will do the job. It’s best if they are the same type of material too, as you never know what types of materials may affect the bacteria that’s alive.

Inert materials like glass or ceramic should be perfectly fine, but a metal like copper has antibacterial properties and some types of wood might not be a good idea either.

Step 2: Empty a probiotic capsule into 1 glass

Almost all probiotic supplements use gel capsules which easily pull apart. While holding it above one of the glasses, pull the capsule apart so the powder falls into it.

You won’t put any in the 2nd glass.

Step 3: Fill both glasses with a small amount of milk

What you will want to do is fill each with a small amount of milk. You don’t need much. As you see, how much we put in our glasses is less than 1 inch.

The purpose of the 2nd glass – which has no probiotics in it – is merely for comparative purposes, so you can see what the milk ends up looking like when you don’t add anything.

Filling your cup/container up all the way might make it harder to gauge performance, since the probiotic strains will be spread too thin across too large of a volume.

To stir or not stir? We’ll discuss that in a moment.

Step 4: Cover and monitor

Cover the cups. In this photo it’s aluminum foil, which is what we used in the first test. However we advise using a Saran wrap-like plastic which you can tightly seal around the cup to trap the off-gassing from the bacteria.

Should you place them in the refrigerator? We didn’t and logically, it doesn’t make sense to.

Think about it… bacteria will grow faster at room temperature than inside your fridge, which is 40 °F or lower. That’s the whole reason we refrigerate food, to drastically reduce bacterial growth.

Even if the probiotics are living, it might be hard to tell if you’re expecting them to flourish in such a cold environment.

Test #1: foil + non-dairy milk + no stirring

Can you test your probiotics using almond milk, soy milk, or another non-dairy type?

The articles and posts we had read said you could (even though they weren’t actually using it themselves). Being told it was okay, we conducted this first test using Good Karma flax milk, as that’s what was readily available in the kitchen (since we’re vegan, no dairy milk is here).

Zero hour

Starting out, this is how it looked.

Remember in this test we aren’t stirring at all. What you see above is what it looks like immediately after pouring the milk. That’s the probiotic powder which has floated to the surface in clumps.

3 hours later

Although not shown, keep in mind that between photos we are keeping both cups covered with foil.

6 hours

9 hours

As you see hour 6 and 9 look almost identical, which suggests the most activity is during the first 6 hours.

12 hours

This was taken in the middle of the night and hence, the shadows from the lights (other pics were with sunlight). It doesn’t look a whole lot different from what we saw at hour 6.

24 hours

Only a negligible, slight change overnight.

48 hours

The biggest difference between 1 and 2 days is the brown growth permeating throughout the milk.

The black probiotic blobs have also expanded by another 10-20% in size. We know this isn’t caused by just the flax milk, since the control cup on the right has none of that discoloration.

Verdict?

Something definitely happened. The change from hour 0 and 3 we’re ignoring, because that could have just been the dust floating up and settling on the surface.

However the difference you see between hours 3 and 6 (or anytime thereafter) is something taking place. Can the Garden of Life be considered probiotics that pass the milk test?

We would say yes they are alive, but we want another testing method to confirm potency… using cow’s milk.

Test #2: plastic wrap + dairy milk + stirring

Being vegan with none handy in the kitchen, we bought the smallest bottle of dairy we could find. It sucks how even this tiny bottle costs only about 25% less than a much bigger quart!

Compared to the last testing method, the differences in this one are:

dairy instead of non-dairy milk
thoroughly stirring the probiotic powder once, at the beginning
airtight seal from plastic (instead of foil)