The Probiotic That The Pros Take

My favorite origin story is Fitbiomics, the company behind the V-Nella probiotic. Yes, they beat Spiderman. Suck it, Spiderman.

Back in the late 2010s, a group of researchers from Harvard took poop samples of marathon runners before and after the Boston Marathon. Yes, please. And the research (which was eventually published in Nature Medicine) showed that Veillonella atypica was elevated post race in the fastest runners. That could be an incidental finding, right?

The researchers followed up, finding a potential mechanism--enhanced lactate utilization in the gut. After Nature Medicine published their work, the researchers peaced out of academia and started Fitbiomics. Science, meet capitalism.

The world of research on probiotics is quite good (we did a big overview of that early in 2026), but most of that research faces a big problem: the gut microbiome is weird as heck. It changes rapidly, and those changes might be related to everything from performance to sexual function to even mood (the gut-brain connection seems real!). But it’s rarely as simple as saying “this change causes this outcome,” since the confounders distort most of the individual signal.