I just wanted clear skin, a face that looked like glass or a donut or whatever people are calling smooth, unblemished complexions nowadays. I didn’t expect it to kind of ruin my life.
I’d struggled with breakouts since middle school. One thing that didn’t plague me, though? Stomach problems. I could scarf any food without complaint. So, a few years ago, when a dermatologist recommended a multi-month course of antibiotics for acne, I didn’t even think about the potential impact of systematically razing all my gut flora.
My chronic tummy issues started to manifest not long after I quit doxycycline. The occasional constipation or rumbly gut turned into near-daily stomach aches that worsened with certain foods and drinks. Over-the-counter probiotics only seemed to exacerbate the problem.
“There’s a lot of individual variability in terms of people’s microbiome compositions, and a single probiotic that may work for everyone doesn’t really exist yet,” says Dr. Amir Zarrinpar, a gastroenterologist at UC San Diego Health. Grocery store probiotics may not be viable or contain the dosages they claim on the bottle, and, moreover, “a [recent study] showed that, for people taking antibiotics, sometimes taking probiotics can prevent normal gut microflora from returning,” he adds—which could explain why my well-intentioned supplements made things worse.
I started to resign myself to the idea that I might be dealing with gut problems for the rest of my life. Then I heard about San Diego–based supplement company Floré.
Floré vends pre-formulated blends for specific needs and symptoms, but its most unique offering is even more specialized: customized probiotics based on each customer’s internal ecosystem. “Between two individuals, we can be as much as 90 percent unique in our gut microbiome,” says Floré founder Sunny Jain. “[It helps to have] a true picture of what’s going on inside your body and what you’re exposed to.”
To do that, the company partners with a lab to test your gut flora and develop a unique combo of good bugs, packing it into capsules you take once per day. (The test costs $299, but the company will also make you a blend based on results from other outside labs if customers have a preferred or cheaper choice.) “That has been a direction that a lot of companies and therapeutic products are going in,” Zarrinpar says. “They don’t think there’s a single bacteria that’s going to make things better or healthier. It’s probably going to be a community of bacteria, and there may need to be a characterization of either the person’s diet or microbiome. A targeted approach may be more effective, but because there haven’t been any big studies, we don’t know yet.”
Intrigued, I decided to try out Floré’s product for six months to see if it could banish my tummy troubles.
My first shipment from Floré didn’t include any pills. Instead, a microbiome test kit arrived in my mailbox, complete with everything I needed to collect a “sample.”
This is the most awkward and, frankly, gross part of the process—you’ll need to mail in a very small amount of stool for Floré to share with the lab.
My formula arrived about six weeks after Floré received my test kit. The customized blend contained both probiotics and prebiotics—the latter, Jain explains, are intended to “trigger the growth of good organisms. The prebiotics are the food for those microbes.”
At the time of reporting, Floré’s services included an analysis of the different critters in my gut and how they might have shaped my symptoms. Nowadays, information from the company focuses more on the formula itself: “We say, ‘Based on the composition of your gut, we added these probiotic strains, which act on these organisms in your microbiome,’” CEO Craig Rouskey explains.
You’re encouraged to keep your pills in the fridge and take one a day 20 minutes before your first meal. Over the next month or so, my once-chronic tummy aches got fewer and further between—occuring only briefly every few weeks, no matter what I ate (even after another short bout of antibiotics for a UTI).
About eight weeks in, I was still sometimes bloated, with bowel movements that alternated between too often and not often enough. I reached out to the Floré team to ask for a reformulation that addressed those symptoms more directly (typically, reformulations have to be requested within six weeks, but the team was kind enough to make an exception).
When I retested at the three-month mark, though, bacteroides vulgatus, a microbe sometimes found in overabundance in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis, had shot up in prevalence from 10 to 23 percent of my microbiome. “Sometimes a formula works well, but then you have a new issue,” Rouskey says. “Reformulations are about trying to maintain relevance for the individual.”
Sure enough, an updated blend based on my retest returned me to what I consider my new baseline: Stomachaches are rare, but bloating and other annoying yet painless symptoms still occur at least a few times a week, which the Floré team might be able to address with future tweaks.
I paused the probiotics about nine months ago to see if the results would hold—and they have. While I may never again chow down with the same teenage breeziness, thanks to Floré, my belly and I have finally made our peace.
Floré custom probiotics cost $99 per month after an initial $299 testing fee.
