Anybody here has done first hand experiments on themselves care to comment?
The product is not a DIY FMT, but serves a similar function (restore missing aggregate metabolic pathways).
Personally, from generation 1 of our product onwards I've felt considerably less stressed, more upbeat/happy, and haven't had diarrhea (I have IBS-D, so that's a huge one for me personally). Our pilot study has offered us preliminary confirmation of this, so we're paying for a 200 person placebo-controlled follow up study.
Early versions did have hiccups, but IMO gas is FAR preferable to diarrhea.
I don't personally think DIY is worth the risk, as there are a lot of things you'd absolutely need to screen for if you're considering that route (see http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/776501_4 for a minimal list). I think you should also screen for mental disorders, stress disorders, mood disorders, etc. Basically anything known to be correlated with the microbiome at minimum.
Assuming you've screened for those things (which is to say basically a pro-level FMT), I think it's basically safe -- there are a lot of FMT procedures performed every year with minimal side effects.
#include disclaimer: obviously not medical advice, etc, etc
It takes about 30 days to get a decision one way or another, we are prioritizing lawyer time using the wait list: http://eepurl.com/5qS9z
Another question... what is your take on the fecal transplant process and do you ever think it could end up in a "pill format"? Are you aware of any such pills in the North American market?
I've been following the FMT related news recently, and since starting specific probiotics my NSAID related GI issues have been vastly reduced to almost zero pain.
Once you start shipping to Scotland I'll give your product a try!
If you're running one that involves disease, doctors, regulators, etc those numbers grow exponentially. FDA trials (which are often less than 200 people) are in the 100s of millions.
Email me (david@generalbiotics.com) if you'd like some help setting one up.
ED: Can't reply because of rate-limiting. So;
It breaks down a bit differently. Foods which are gluten-free are quite different in several ways. There are a lot of unhealthy things I avoid while also avoiding gluten.
I think that short carbs influence the dopaminergic system which intestinal health influences the serotonergic system. Both are feel-good hormones. I suffer from chronic depression which seems to mean permanently reduced levels of one or both of these. I'm an 80s kid, meaning my formative years happened during a time which was crazy on many levels. I don't have diabetes, fortunately. Aside from chronic depression I'm in very good health.
Take this as you will.
There are people who are "gluten sensitive" and my wife is one of them. More specifically, she is only sensitive to gluten in American products. She cannot eat anything with gluten here in the US without immediately having very painful stomach cramps and bloating. We spend about one month per year in Spain, where she is from, and she eats all the bread and gluten that she wants with absolutely no problems.
So, all I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't be quick to judge people who don't eat gluten and don't have celiac, unless they're just doing it because they heard it was bad.
In regard to the study, I didn't read all the info, but I'm not sure that 37 people is a convincing sample size. I've also heard other Europeans complain about exactly the same thing.
My allergies were terrible before, now they are barely there and manageable taking the occasional zyrtec. My gastrointestinal issues are mostly gone, although I've read that could be from a reduction in inflammation in the gut lining, but might be related to changes in my gut microbes too. Hard to tell.
My energy levels are more sustained and even (no more crashes), and my moods are generally better. Who knows if my changing gut flora is the reason, it might be. I know not feeding those little buggers tons of sugar really changes things up! :)
Or it's all placebo and I'm just healthier in general. Either way I'm feeling better. I'm sure science will eventually figure out if the link is causal or not, but in the meantime don't let my anecdotal story sway you too much.
edit: oops I forgot to mention I also take a probiotic every now and then. Align is the name, I like it but I don't take probiotics regularly.
No it isn't. People quote Barry Marshall[1] all the time but most people don't perform their self-experimentation with any kind of rigour. How many people have access to endoscopy to take before / after tests?
Self experimentation could be an excellent source of data. Quite a few "interesting" things cannot effectively be rigorously tested, either because we have no effective placebo, or because they are inhumane (e.g., the vast majority of so-called "rigorous" diet studies are actually based on self-reporting and willful compliance, because you can't keep people in controlled a lab for more than a few weeks). Also, as Ionnadis pointed out, quite a bit of (supposedly rigourous) published research is simply wrong.
So for a lot of things, we have to do with "amateur hour" experiments, whether conducted in a university lab and published in Nature, or conducted at home and published in a blog.
Self-experimentation can easily disprove a "general truth" but cannot really support one due to lack of controls ( and do recall the scientific method is statement about disproving things, not about proving them) However, if you do stumble on a local version of a "general truth", you can then look for the n->inf version more rigorously.
You can look at e.g. the late Seth Roberts for examples; the ideas are interesting, some of his successes have been replicated by enough people; Among these - correlation between Vitamin D intake time and sleep quality (see gwern for a rigorous test of that experiment, that confirms it for n=|{gwern}|=1, and many other less rigorous; Rigorous correlation among flax seed (supposedly omega 3) intake, butter, bacon and response time for n=|{seth}|=1, which I have not published but have verified rigorously for n=|me|=1 about flax seed. And there are a few others. I think some of his ideas are crazy but almost all are interesting.
(Self-reported) success on his Shangri-La diet is ~80%, which is very high for a diet, but obviously not a general truth since it is not 100%. It worked for me once, but not the 2nd time a couple of years later despite following exactly the same protocol. I'd say self-experimentation is much less rigorous, but way more time-and-captial efficient way of arriving at results.
By the way, did anyone find out what happened to Seth?