Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

But there also are studies that suggest that if you layer rapidly fermentable fibers on top of a Western diet,

you actually can result in weird metabolism happening in your liver because you have this incredibly rapid fermentation of fiber along with a lot of fat coming into the system.

At least that's the theory.

And in a mouse study that was published a few years ago, they actually see that a subset of the mice develop hepatocellular carcinoma when they're fed a high dose prebiotic.

liver cancer on top of a Western diet.

So whether that's representative of human biology, we don't know.

But purified fibers are definitely very different, both in terms of the diversity of structures, but also in terms of

how rapidly they're fermented in the gut.

Because, you know, if you are eating plants, the complex structures there really slow the microbes down in terms of fermentation, and you end up with a slow rate of fermentation over the length of your colon, as opposed to this big burst of fermentation that can happen if you eat something that is highly soluble and easily accessed by the microbes.

Yeah.

So Erica, my wife and I wrote a book called The Good Gut.

And that really was a response to how we were changing our lives in response to being in the field, being very familiar with the research, seeing that a lot of our friends that weren't studying the gut microbiome, but were very well-informed, many of them scientists, were not doing the same things we were doing.

And it was very clear that it was just the lack of information funneling out of the field to other people.

And so we wanted to make that accessible to people who are not microbiome scientists.

And then in terms of kind of connecting with our research, certainly there's the Center for Human Microbiome Studies at Stanford, which is kind of our home base for doing a lot of these dietary interventions.

We list the studies there, give more information on what we're doing.

And then we have a lab website, too, that people can go to and read more about our research.

And we're always looking for participants for our studies.

Thanks, Andrew.

This was a great conversation.