Lauren Petersen, PhD, is a postdoctoral associate investigating the microbiome and she's back on the podcast to update us on her research. Be sure to listen to our first interview first!

I sent Lauren some of the probiotics we use in our practice, and she said, "they look great!"

Lauren did some calculations for the number of CFUs, and she got pretty much exactly what the bottle claims for live organisms, with growth on both Lactobacillus-selective and Bifidobacterium-selective medias. The same was not true for Renew probiotics where her qPCR analysis showed that Bifidobacterium was pretty much all dead.

Here are some photos of the Lactobacillus-selective and Bifidobacterium-selective plates that Lauren used to grow the probiotics. She shot for 250 CFUs per plate (based on if all the organisms per gramme probiotic were alive) and that's pretty much what she got!

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Here's the outline of this interview with Lauren Petersen, PhD:

[00:00:32] Previous episode: The Athlete Microbiome Project: The Search for the Golden Microbiome.

[00:03:10] Prevotella.

[00:04:42] uBiome and The American Gut Project.

[00:05:25] Scher, Jose U., et al. "Expansion of intestinal Prevotella copri correlates with enhanced susceptibility to arthritis." Elife 2 (2013): e01202.

[00:06:33] Probiotics: S. boulardii.

[00:08:48] Bifidobacteria.

[00:09:54] Testing probiotics: Renew Life.

[00:12:06] D-Lactate Free Bifido Probiotic.

[00:12:28] Sign up for our highlights email.

[00:14:44] qPCR analysis definitely picked up lactobacillus.

[00:15:33] 16S vs qPCR.

[00:16:03] RNA-Seq.

[00:17:20] Whole-genome shotgun.

[00:18:26] 60-day Bionic Fiber Program.

[00:19:11] Brummel & Brown 35% Vegetable Oil Spread with Yogurt + bananas. I'm not linking to this rubbish because it's not fit for human consumption.

[00:21:25] Akkamansia.

[00:21:49] Remely, Marlene, et al. "Increased gut microbiota diversity and abundance of Faecalibacterium prausnitzii and Akkermansia after fasting: a pilot study." Wiener klinische Wochenschrift 127.9-10 (2015): 394-398.

[00:24:41] Tolerating inulin.

[00:25:22] Celeriac root.

[00:26:19] Where do the microbes come from?

[00:28:33] Antibiotics.

[00:29:09] Cephalexin antibiotic.

[00:29:56] Clindamycin antibiotic.

[00:32:08] Amoxicillin antibiotic.

[00:33:54] Metabolic endotoxaemia.

[00:39:28] Mother Dirt.

[00:41:42] FMT and the Taymount Clinic.

[00:42:17] 4-Cresol Vancomycin.