My understanding is that a lot of the beneficial organisms dining the presence of oxygen, making it challenging to collect, multiply, and package them into pills or powder. Perhaps this is why they only offer the pills, the powder form in a jar would render some of them ineffective?
I was thinking a sealed Mylar bag with O2 absorbers but I can see the cost issue that may arise especially if only a few self experimenters like me were interested to begin with.
As soon as you open the bag it's all exposed to o2. In a blister pack each does is in its own little chamber so when you open one dose it doesn't impact the others.
An interesting aside, they started doing this kind of thing in the last few years for inhalers. There are some medicines that come as a fey powder, and need to be inhaled as such. It's a challenge to keep a bunch of doses together in one container and dose doses out without impacting the rest, so they do the same thing. The inhalers have little blister packs with individual doses in them, each time you need to take a puff you rotate the inhaler which advances to the next dose, pops the blister pack, and then you inhale.
It's probably OK if a percentage of them are damaged by the O2. If I take 4 to 8 trillion each time it just means I would have to do it more often.
The only alternative I know is the usual and incorrect in my opinion way people consume probiotics which is significantly worse. Most are destroyed by the hydrochloride acid, digestive enzymes and bile. Worse, some of them survive and have to pass through the small intestine which is absolutely the wrong place for bacteria to exist, especially if there is even the slightest amount of inflammation of the junctions and especially if some remain in the mucus layer and grow in numbers potentially leading to SIBO.
With my current method they go straight into a container of short chained fatty acids which I understand they can feed off of for a while. The SCFA are also beneficial for the large intestine.
