Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

We saw this increase in microbiota diversity over the course of the six weeks while they were consuming the fermented foods.

We can't always say that higher diversity is better when it comes to our microbial communities.

We know there are cases, for instance, bacterial vaginosis, where higher diversity is actually indicative of a disease state.

But we know in the context of the gut and for people living in the industrialized world, higher diversity is generally better.

We know that there's a spectrum of diversity.

People with higher diversity generally are healthier.

If you can push your diversity higher, you're in better shape.

And so we saw that increase in diversity.

And then the major question is what happened to the immune system as these people were increasing their gut microbiota diversity through the fermented foods?

So we did this massive immune profiling and we see a couple dozen immune markers, inflammatory markers decrease over the course of the study.

So we measure these at multiple time points throughout the course of the study and there's kind of this stepwise reduction in things like interleukin-6 and interleukin-12, a variety of kind of famous inflammatory mediators.

And then even if you go into the immune cells and you start looking at their signaling cascades, we see that those signaling cascades are less activated at the end of the study compared to the beginning of the study, indicating an attenuation of inflammation.

So kind of exactly what we would hypothesize would lead to less propensity for inflammatory disease over time.

That's a huge extension of a very short study.

You know, tons of people say they have more energy, they think more clearly, they sleep better.

And it's really hard to uncouple like, is this because, you know, these people have taken charge now of what they're eating and just feel better in general for being in control of kind of what they're doing?

Or is there this cascading set of effects that are actually kind of emanating from the gut-brain axis?

And I should say, you know, the list of this goes on and on.

There are people who claim that their complexion improves and that they're, you know, allergies.

And there's probably all sorts of ripple effects if you can affect your inflammation.