SodaTide Ingredients: Chicory Root Inulin, Potato Resistant Starch and a Probiotic Blend

Inulin is a chain of fructose units with a glucose cap, stored by chicory in its root the way a potato stores starch. The bond between those units is one human digestive enzymes have no key for, which is the whole reason it is interesting: it arrives in the colon intact and the bacteria there eat it.

It is the most studied prebiotic fibre there is. The ISAPP consensus definition was written largely around this class of compound. A dose-response study in 200 volunteers raised faecal bifidobacteria at 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10 grams a day, with the effect larger at the top of that range. A 12-week trial at 21 grams a day recorded lower ghrelin, higher peptide YY and about a kilogram of weight change against a placebo that gained half of one. A 16-week trial in children used 8 grams a day and measured body fat directly.

The pooled picture is more modest than any single trial. The 2024 chicory inulin meta-analysis is the reference point for weight outcomes; a 2021 pooled analysis and a 2017 one cover weight, glucose and lipids together. For glucose specifically, a dose-response review in prediabetes and type 2 diabetes is the one to read.

What the bottle gives you is the name. The amount is a matter for the label section below rather than for this card.

Resistant starch is starch that gets past the small intestine. Potato starch in its raw, ungelatinised form is one of the densest natural sources of it, which is why it turns up in supplements rather than the cooked kind.

The dose literature here is wider and less settled than inulin's. A 2024 analysis of resistant potato starch tested 3.5 grams a day for one and four weeks and states in its own background that the prebiotic effects of resistant starches are linked to intakes above 15 grams a day. An acute appetite crossover used 48 grams across two meals. A potato side-dish trial added the starch as food, shifted the gut microbiota and found no change in faecal short-chain fatty acid concentrations, which is a useful reminder that measuring the output is harder than measuring the input.

Pooled: a glycaemic-control meta-analysis and a review in metabolic syndrome both report small effects that depend heavily on who was studied. One study looked specifically at variability and found the microbiome response to resistant starch differs substantially between people, which is the honest answer to why one person notices something and another does not.

A probiotic is defined as a live micro-organism that confers a health benefit when administered in an adequate amount. The ISAPP consensus statement that sets that out is equally clear that both halves are specific: the organism is named at strain level, and the amount is a colony-forming-unit count.

This label gives the category and stops. That is a real limit on what can be said, and this desk will not work round it by describing somebody else's strain as though it were in this capsule.

What the literature shows, when a strain IS named, is worth knowing anyway. The Akkermansia muciniphila study gave 10^10 cells a day for three months to overweight, insulin-resistant volunteers and reported improved insulin sensitivity for the pasteurised form. A 12-week trial of L. gasseri SBT2055 used 200 grams a day of a fermented milk carrying the strain and measured abdominal fat area by scan. A meta-analysis across trials finds small average effects on body fat and cardiovascular markers.

There is also a quality question that applies to the whole category. An audit of commercial probiotic products compared what labels claimed with what the bottles contained and found the two agreed less often than a buyer would assume. A strain list is what makes that checkable.