Disagree. You can not make that claim without sequencing your mouth's microbiome in the absence of probiotics for a month as well (and, really, many more than one persom's). Was your diet controlled all month? Oral hygiene habits? Any of a million other variables?

Also, it's worth pointing out that the study was designed to test one hypothesis, and you need to be very careful about looking at further claims. This test only really provided evidence that these probiotics don't introduce L. reuterii.

You can get refrigerated probiotic supps at a place like Whole Foods.

Source: I used to work in the industry.

On a tangent, nice to see Plasmidsaurus using Emu [1], which has been shown to work great for 16S ribosomal RNA analysis on ONT by basically everyone I've heard who tried it. It has a nice algorithm for predicting if variants are due to ONT sequencing errors or are true variants, based on an expectation maximization algorithm, and thus working around the somewhat limited accuracy in ONT reads. Pretty clever stuff.

And if you want to run your own analysis on the raw data using Emu, you might want to try out our Trana pipeline built around Emu in Nextflow [2]. Apart from running Emu, it does some of the preprocessing like filtering, as well as exporting as Krona diagrams etc.

We're just putting it through validation at the clinical microbiology lab at Karolinska here in Stockholm right now.

The main caveat worth mentioning is that the choice of database seems to be able to affect results quite a lot in some cases.

[1] https://github.com/treangenlab/emu

[2] https://github.com/genomic-medicine-sweden/TRANA

I hope we see a lot more posts like this in the future.

Doctors don’t really care to look at these kinds of issues. It took years of suffering and autoimmune issues (particularly muscle spasms and joint pain) alongside gut problems before I demanded a gastroenterologist test me for H pylori and SIBO: I was positive for both.

H pylori was a painful treatment process, but I cleared it after one round of quad therapy. SIBO on the other hand, a condition I think we hardly understand, has been hard to deal with. Many rounds of rifaximin with very minimal relief and no real answer as to how to deal with it.

Doctors are hesitant to help, so I’ve resulted to a lot of personal experimentation to deal with it. The only thing that ever worked (and it’s just anecdata so unsure) was sulbultiamine supplementation, but I can’t actually get that anymore and normal thiamine doesn’t help.

This is all to say: I think microbiome is supremely important to health, very few things seem to really impact it, and doctors are hesitant to deal with these systems at all. I’m sure FMTs will become much more popular for a variety of conditions, but it seems like it’s a real risk where not only might someone else’s microbiome not be a fit for your physiology, but you could be inheriting a variety of risks the donor is susceptible to but you are not.

I am not a doctor and much of what I’m saying may be wrong. Don’t quote me please.

and probiotics are the absolute worst of the industry with endless lies in claims and products that often test with nothing of the claim in them

if you want to try probiotics

1. start with a single strain probiotic, multi-strain are often lies

2. try an extremely well known/proven probiotic

want to know something is happening? try lp299v Lactobacillus Plantarum

it's cheap, it's been studied for 30+ years so lots of trials and proven claims

it won't colonize, no oral probiotic will colonize, so you have to keep taking it or it's gone in a few days from your GI

I used to turn my nose up at it, but I got some branching out at a beer bar that tasted pretty good (0.5% ABV so you'd puke from too much liquid before getting drunk). It seemed more of a breakfast drink so I had a few ounces every morning. Most regular I've been in my life. That said, the "evidence" presented in the article should not be considered due to the lack of controls (just look at the variance between day -4 and day -1). Both this comment and the article are anecdotal.

But kombucha is a lot cheaper than manufactured probiotics, refrigerated, and the drink is acidic so the bacteria in the drink should already be well suited to the stomach pH (1-3 vs 2.5-3.5 kombucha).

their claims on their website:

replaces S. mutans, alters oral microbiome, reduces acid via ethanol metabolism, produces antibiotic, freshens breath, brightens teeth, lasts decades. etc

i am very skeptical of it