It is important to remember that most of the products available with 10 billion or even as high as 100 billion cells are formulated with lactobacillus and bifidobacterium strains, which are strains that are not probiotics by all scientific definitions. Companies that use these non-probiotic strains look to compete with others by simply increasing the cell count in each capsule, but is this effective? Numerous published studies have shown that no matter how many billions of cells you have of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium species, they simply do not survive the stomach, they don’t get to the intestines alive and so the count is irrelevant. In addition, if they did happen to survive somehow, would they be effective probiotics then? The answer is no! Even with 100 billion cells of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium species, they are not delivering an “effective dose”. What makes an effective dose isn’t how many probiotic cells are in your probiotic capsule. An effective dose is defined by how that amount of probiotics in your capsule compares to the population of that same species naturally found in your gastrointestinal system. There are over 10 TRILLION lactobacillus and bifidobacterium cells in your digestive system, thus adding even 100 Billion is less than 0.1% of the existing population, and your body doesn’t even notice it. It’s like adding a single penny into a bucket with 4000 quarters; you would never notice it and it doesn’t add any value to what is already there. Just Thrive is made up of key strains whose numbers tend to remain low in the digestive system. Typically they have a population of around 5-6 million cells in the digestive system. When you add 3 billion cells from Just Thrive to a population of just 5-6 million, you get a massive, positive stimulation as your effective dose exceeds the native population by over 500 times. It’s like adding 20 quarters to a cup that contains just 1 penny – you are adding a lot of value.