Lemme’s Apple Cider Debloat Gummy Has 80 mg of Prebiotic. The Trial It Leans On Used 35 Times That

Kourtney Kardashian Barker’s supplement brand put its best-known gummy in a fall coat. Lemme Debloat in Apple Cider, a limited-edition flavour Lemme announced on Instagram on August 30 and describes as a Target exclusive, is on shelves now at $29.99 for a bottle of 60 — thirty days of the two-gummy serving. The original flavour is blackberry; the brand says this one is “the same gut-loving formula you know and love,” and the two Supplement Facts panels agree on every active ingredient. It is, on timing alone, a smart drop: apple-cider season, a Target run, a product whose whole promise fits in one word.

That word is the interesting part. Debloat is, by the brand’s description, “powered by two clinically-studied probiotics and a prebiotic,” and the trials behind that phrase are real and findable. What the label does not say is how far the gummy sits from the doses those trials used. So we read both panels, pulled every study the ingredients point to, and did the arithmetic. The short version: the prebiotic is one thirty-fifth of the dose in the trial that made it a prebiotic, the probiotic has no stated count, and the bloating evidence comes from people who already had a diagnosis. Here is the long version, with the company’s own words alongside.

The panelWhat two gummies contain

Per two gummies, the Lemme panel lists 15 calories, 4 grams of carbohydrate, 3 grams of sugar (all of it added), 80 milligrams of xylooligosaccharides, and a “Proprietary Probiotic Blend” of two spore-forming bacteria: Bacillus coagulans MTCC 5856, sold under the trade name LactoSpore, and Bacillus subtilis DE111. The Target panel for the apple cider flavour matches, and adds one number the brand site leaves off: the blend weighs 44 milligrams. Neither panel gives a colony-forming-unit count, which is the number every probiotic trial is dosed in, and neither lists apple cider vinegar — “Apple Cider” is a flavour, delivered by natural flavours and vegetable juice for colour. The excipients differ slightly between flavours (coconut oil and carnauba wax here; sunflower oil there), the actives do not.

The claims are consistent across the brand’s pages: “Relieves bloating symptoms and supports debloating,” “Supports relief of occasional gas,” “2 gummies a day for simple bloat relief,” and on a landing page, “Fast-Acting Bloat Relief, Every Day.” Each carries the asterisk that federal law requires on a structure/function claim: “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” That sentence is not a formality. It is the legal category the whole product lives in, and it means the evidence is ours to check.

The prebioticEighty milligrams, and the trials at 1,400 and 8,000

Xylooligosaccharides are a legitimate prebiotic with a small but real human literature, and the gummy’s dose is not in it. The reference trial, published in 2014, gave 32 healthy adults 1.4 or 2.8 grams of XOS a day, or placebo, for eight weeks. Both doses raised bifidobacteria counts; the 2.8-gram group “showed significantly greater increases than the 1.4 g per day group”; and XOS “was tolerated without significant gastrointestinal side effects.” Note what the trial measured: bacteria in stool and tolerance on a daily symptom chart. It did not test whether anyone felt less bloated. Two gummies deliver 80 milligrams, which is one seventeenth of the low dose and one thirty-fifth of the high one.

The only XOS trial that did look at bloating is a British study from the same year, and its dose was 8 grams a day for 21 days in healthy adults — a hundred times the gummy. Bowel movements per day increased and bifidobacteria rose, and XOS “did not alter the symptoms of bloating, abdominal pain or flatulence.” Read plainly, the best evidence on this ingredient says that at a hundredfold the label dose, it did not change bloating either way. That is not evidence against the gummy so much as evidence that the prebiotic is not where its bloating promise can come from. For a sense of scale, the viral inulin gummies deliver 5 grams of their prebiotic per serving; a can of Olipop delivers 9. Eighty milligrams is a garnish.

The probiotics“Clinically studied,” and by whom

The bloating claim rests on the two Bacillus strains, and here the phrase “clinically-studied” is doing precise work. B. coagulans MTCC 5856 has been studied for bloating, in two trials, both dosed at 2 billion colony-forming units a day. The first, a 2016 pilot, enrolled 36 newly diagnosed patients with diarrhea-predominant IBS at three centres, gave half the strain alongside standard care for 90 days, and reported a significant drop in bloating, abdominal pain, diarrhea and stool frequency versus placebo. The second, in 2023, enrolled 70 adults at hospitals in southern India who already had functional gas and bloating — an indigestion score of at least 5 on a standard scale — and after four weeks the strain group’s score fell from 8.9 to 3.1 while placebo went from 9.4 to 8.4. Those are genuine results in the populations they tested. They are not results in people without a diagnosis who feel puffy after dinner, which is the customer the landing page addresses with “Jeans Tight After Dinner?” The one trial in healthy people measured safety and the microbiome over 28 days, found the strain “does not alter the gut microbiome of healthy individuals,” and had no bloating endpoint at all.

Every one of those papers lists authors from Sami-Sabinsa, the company that makes and sells LactoSpore. That is disclosed in the papers and is normal for ingredient trials; it is also the reason the word “independent” does not appear in this paragraph. The second strain, B. subtilis DE111, comes with a different kind of literature: a 2021 study in 11 people with ileostomies showed the spores germinate in the small intestine within three hours, and a 2023 follow-up found a single dose “had limited detectable effect on the microbiome.” Both are from employees of the strain’s maker, and neither measured bloating. The brand describes DE111 as “studied for digestive health and gut health,” which is accurate, and which is not the same claim as the one on the front of the bottle.

Then there is the number that is missing. All of those trials are dosed in CFU; the label gives a weight, 44 milligrams, and no count. Without it there is no way to place the gummy on the dose line the trials drew, and a gummy is a difficult format for spores to survive in any case — heat, moisture and sugar all cost viability over a shelf life, which is why serious probiotic makers print a count guaranteed to expiry. We searched PubMed and the federal trial registry for any study of Lemme Debloat itself. There is none; the brand’s own explainer on whether the gummies work cites no specific study.

What bloating isAnd why a gummy is a hard way at it

It helps to know what the target is. A 2021 Mayo Clinic review defines bloating as “symptoms of trapped gas, abdominal pressure, and fullness,” distinct from distension, which is a measurable change in girth, and lists the usual causes: food intolerances, a past gut infection that shifted the microbiota, disordered sensation in the gut wall, slow transit, and an abnormal reflex in which the diaphragm drops and the abdominal wall relaxes when gas arrives. The review’s verdict on treatment is honest: “no regimen has been consistently successful,” with probiotics among several options that help some people and not others. Most everyday bloating, in other words, is not a bacteria-count problem, and the things that reliably move it — meal size, fermentable-carbohydrate load, constipation, how fast you eat — are not in a gummy of any flavour.

The contextA big brand, a legal category, and a season

Lemme launched in September 2022 with matcha, sleep and focus gummies at $30 a bottle and has become one of the largest celebrity-founded supplement brands in the country. In 2024, a consumer-law firm said it was investigating the marketing of several Lemme products, Debloat among them; the report described an investigation rather than a lawsuit, and Lemme did not comment at the time. None of that makes the gummy unsafe — the ingredients are well characterised, the doses are low, and the label’s own advice to check with a physician if pregnant, nursing or on medication is the standard one. It makes it a $29.99 flavour of a product whose promise is carried by trials of other people at other doses.

If you like the taste and the ritual, there is no reason on the evidence to stop; if you are buying it for the bloating, the honest read of the literature is that the prebiotic is too small to matter, the probiotic count is unstated, and the strain’s bloating trials were run in people with IBS or diagnosed functional bloating by the company that sells the strain. Reading a probiotic label comes down to two questions: what strain, and how many. Debloat answers the first. Lemme had no involvement in this article, which is educational, describes what the cited labels and trials say, and is not medical advice.