ZBiotics — Feel Better After Drinking, Wake Up Refreshed, Science-Backed, Patented Probiotic for Easier Mornings, Travel-Friendly, 6-Pack of 0.5 Fl Oz Bottles

When you drink, most of the alcohol you consume gets digested in the liver using a two-step process (see diagram). Each step requires a different enzyme produce by your liver.

1. Alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) converts ethanol into acetaldehyde by removing hydrogen atoms—a process called oxidation.
2. Acetaldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) then further oxidizes acetaldehyde into acetate by adding an oxygen atom, producing a more stable and innocuous compound.

However, some of the alcohol you drink never reaches your liver. Instead, it is metabolized in your gut, in large part by the microbes that reside there. Some microbes in the gut microbiome are equipped with the first enzyme, ADH, and can convert alcohol into acetaldehyde. But in contrast to your liver, they don’t make enough of the second enzyme, ALDH, to convert acetaldehyde into acetate. This is the major cause of acetaldehyde buildup in your body (Salaspuro, 1996).

Thus arises a clear hypothesis: If we can equip the gut microbiome to break down acetaldehyde into acetate, we can support the body’s ability to minimize the buildup of this toxic byproduct. While the liver is fully capable of metabolizing acetaldehyde, the gut is not—and that gap makes this approach especially valuable for those planning to have a drink or two.

If you’re trying to enable the gut microbiome to break down acetaldehyde, the most straightforward approach would be to make a bunch of the same enzyme your liver uses (ALDH) and deliver it to the gut, mimicking exactly what your body already does so effectively. Unfortunately, in this case (and most cases really) we can’t just eat an enzyme to equip our bodies with new traits. Enzymes are proteins, and most proteins you consume will break down very quickly as food in your stomach. Once broken down they lose their function.

But our scientists knew three very interesting things: 

1. There are probiotic bacteria that can survive the harsh environment of the stomach unharmed. 
2. Many bacteria are capable of making ALDH – the very enzyme our livers use to break down acetaldehyde.
3. We can use genetic engineering to create a probiotic bacteria with the ability to make ALDH!

So rather than trying to solve the problem with an enzyme that won’t survive in the gut, we can instead use genetic engineering to build a probiotic bacteria that not only makes the enzyme but can also deliver it safely to where it's most needed to break down acetaldehyde!

Though the actual building and testing behind our engineered ZB183™ strain took years, here is what we did on a basic level: We started with a natural probiotic bacteria called Bacillus subtilis. Humans have been intentionally consuming B. subtilis as a probiotic in supplements and fermented foods (e.g. natto, kombucha, etc.) for centuries. B. subtilis also has the natural ability to pass through your stomach acid unharmed and make enzymes in your gut (citation). We then used a process naturally honed by bacteria to insert the instructions for making ALDH into the bacteria’s genome, carefully selecting a location that optimizes the expression of this enzyme. The result was ZB183™ – a probiotic strain of B. subtilis that is identical in every way to the one humans already consume, but with one additional trait: the ability to break down acetaldehyde.

Once ZB183™ was built, we needed to ensure that it was safe, and that it worked as intended.

Safety

We subjected ZB183™ to years of laboratory testing and review by America’s top food toxicologists, the results of which confirmed it to be completely safe and FDA-compliant. The data from these tests has been published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Toxicology.

Now that we have confirmed our genetically engineered probiotic is safe and works as intended, we make sure this is true of every batch. Pre-Alcohol undergoes rigorous quality testing at every stage, from probiotic biomass to the final product, ensuring safety, purity, and efficacy. We transparently publish our standards for each test on our Quality page which can be found here.

To confirm that ZB183™ worked as intended, we tested its ability to make ALDH and break down acetaldehyde. Over a series of laboratory tests where we compared it to the unedited B. subtilis strain, we confirmed that our Pre-Alcohol Probiotic was highly effective at producing ALDH. We also confirmed that while the control strain broke down almost no acetaldehyde, ZB183™ was able to break down more acetaldehyde than you could ever encounter when drinking. We published a paper containing the data from these tests, and it can be found in the peer-reviewed PLOS One journal..

As scientists we appreciate that every body is different and so there are no silver bullets in biology. Even though we’ve proven that the product can reliably provide the function of helping to metabolize acetaldehyde, we don’t know for sure that it will be perceived as valuable for everyone. However, we do know from customer use data that it does appear to provide a benefit to the vast majority of users (i.e. >95%). And with millions of bottles sold, that’s a lot of happy customers!

ZB183™ was our first proof of concept on a bigger journey to unlock the immense potential of safely and consciously-built genetically engineered microbes.