The paper shows the fundamental flaw and short-sightedness that characterizes life sciences in general. Every single fermented food is treated as if it were a high potency drug. For example, in one study, for each day of a week people in the groups would eat either 110g of sourdough bread or 110g of white bread. Really, is that your experiment? You are trying to detect differences between eating 110g of two breads, o…
That's really not outside the realm of possibility for something to change the microbiome. That's a quarter pound of bread, two servings and about 280 kcal on the loaf I have in front of me. That's a reasonable amount for someone to consume as part of a normal diet. We know small changes in diet can have a large effect on the microbiome. For example, adding seaweed to a mouse diet can select for microbes with the abi…
Also, look at the comparison. It is seaweed! Wouldn't you expect that eating 10% of your weight in seaweed changes a microbiome? It is a massively different food than what we (or mice) typically eat - thus the microbiome has to adapt. I am not saying the discovery is not important - it is the right question, set up correctly.
Compare that to a human eating two slices of different breads for a week. The differences between bread are too subtle. The amount ingested is too little, the time is too short. Your microbiome is already set up for digesting bread. That's all I am saying -
I will stick to my story that there is very little chance that this would ever be sufficient to detect any change.