Episode Details

Do probiotics really seed or populate your gut?

How do you decide which strain or species of probiotic to take? Do certain compounds enhance the efficacy of probiotics? Should probiotics be personalized?

I tackle all these probiotic questions and many more in today's episode with Raja Dhir.

Raja the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Seed, an ecosystem of kindred scientists, doctors, innovators, entrepreneurs, and translational storytellers from around the world. Seed's members collectively believe in the potential of the microbiome to improve human and planetary health.

Raja leads Seed’s research strategy and academic collaborations, clinical trial design, product development, and intellectual property strategy. He is the architect of the Seed Platform and has unique expertise in translating scientific research for product development – including patented inventions to stabilize sensitive compounds to improve human microbiome diversity and inflammatory biomarkers.

He’s also the Co- Chair of Seed’s Scientific Advisory Board where Seed focuses on solving complex ecological problems including honeybee colony collapse, plastic degradation, and soil fertility through bacteria. Raja is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Church Lab in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and is a Director and Co-Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for Micropia, a $20MM microbial ecology / education platform and the world’s first museum dedicated exclusively to microbes.

He also serves on the Editorial Board for the scientific journal, Microbiome, on the Industry Advisory Committee for the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP), and is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), among others.

During our discussion, you'll learn: -Why we misunderstand probiotics, and especially probiotic research...8:30

• Raja's research paper: Probiotics: What they are and what they are not
• We're understanding more and more about the gut and microbiome every day
• An organism must show that it has a specific effect on the body before the term "probiotic" can be used
  • The term "probiotic" is unregulated in the United States
  • Consumers are way ahead of the science
• Proper definition of a probiotic: live microorganisms, which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host
• Unscientific research on probiotics has led to damage in credibility in the field
• Taking one single data set that's not causative and applying the results to the entire field is an unscientific practice

-The recent studies on probiotics that Raja mentions, and sometimes criticizes, in his work...13:45

• Conducted by the Weizmann Institute
  • Got subjects to consent to invasive small intestinal biopsies, versus just the colon
  • Ordinarily you test the large intestine only
• An over emphasis on testing stool samples
• Fallacy: Collecting large amounts of data will give you an accurate answer
• How classical biologists are different:
  • Have a hypothesis,
  • Narrow down an intervention,
  • Test (in a large enough sample size) and look for biomarkers that change in the host
• How the test worked:
  • Gave 3 groups of people large amounts of antibiotics
  • Gave one group probiotics, one group allowed to recover spontaneously (watch