Living Alchemy - Your Flora IMMUNE

Product Notes:

IMMUNE is one of the latest additions to Living Alchemy's "Your Flora" line, which all share the same type of Symbiotic base, with most having at least one other whole food ingredient to provide additional support to help support specific health concerns.

"Your Flora" is a line of Plant-based Probiotics, Prebiotics and Enzymes that's produced in a base of non-GMO, certified organic soybean which has been fermented with a combination of kefir and kombucha: a living culture with about three dozen different strains of beneficial bacteria, which generates additional vitamins and minerals, digestive enzymes, and other nutrients.

That gets freeze-dried to preserve all those nutrients, and is ground up to a powdered form, before being encapsulated in a special type of capsule made from "pullulan": a gummy fibre produced from fermenting tapioca, which is not only suitable for vegans (unlike the usual gelatin-based capsules), but also serves as a prebiotic to nourish the probiotics themselves as it's being digested.

The "Kefi-Soy" foundation in all the "Your Flora" products already provides a good deal of Digestive & Immune Support, not only as a source of so many types of probiotics (many types of oral probiotics do so, especially with respect to allergies and auto-immune diseases, since the immune system and gut flora are intricately related, as explained in some of the references below), but also because the fermentation process enhances its content of a number of key building blocks the digestive and immune systems can use for energy and repair, including amino acids, butyric acid, L-glutamine (which helps heal the gut lining), nucleotides, phospholipids, peptides, and polyphenols (which promote immunity).

This particular formula then adds two additional ingredients with lots of antioxidants to that Living Culture Symbiotic foundation, in order to further target immune function. In both cases, they use the whole food, rather than just an extract or isolate, not only in order to provide the plant's entire range of active constituents (rather than just the most well-known one) but also to facilitate its optimal absorption by supplying all the natural cofactors our bodies expect to find in the food.

* Organic Elderberry berries, an herb widely used in traditional medicine for reducing the symptoms of upper respiratory infections. This formula uses the European variety, which has been cultivated as a medicinal plant for many generations, to provide quite a range of anthocyanins, flavonoids, and other polyphenolics that aren't always present in the North American varieties to the same degree.

* Organic Acerola Cherries, which are very rich not only in vitamin C, but also in flavonoids such as rutin and quercetin (cell-protecting agents with antioxidant, antinociceptive (pain-reducing), and anti-inflammatory properties).