A few readers have severe diet restrictions (mast cells, etc), which contributed to my adding flavonoids and polyphenols data. Once added, I have been connecting them up (a slow manual process).
New Sections on Suggestions Page
At the top, there may be up to 3 onpage jumps such as shown below.
We have already cover probiotics in a prior post, so let us look at the two new one:
Flavonoid Foods
This is a match up with all of the positive modifiers (2x more good risk than harm risk) that are also in our flavonoid database.
Note that all of them are hyperlinked. Clicking on one, for example bananas — takes us to the details for banana.
We see that ONE of the items is very high. This may be what is causing the benefits from banana. Click it to see other foods with this flavonoid.
This list is full of familiar suggestions and a few new ones!
So, if you can’t eat bananas — this is a list of possible alternatives that may help. Some, like Carob, we have no studies on… but this suggests it may be logical to try it.
Flavonoids Suggested
These have been studied and are on your list above. A common problem is getting them. You can buy them as supplements (with huge markups) or you can get them from fresh food — but which foods?
Just click on one of them, say Quercetin,
Items like Capers have not been studied for it’s impact on the microbiome. Again, it is a logical suggestion.
Bottom Line
The early users of these new features have been delighted. It has open up new choices that are logical and reasonable. Whether they work — that is to be determined.
I have been getting several messages a day from readers about this firm that has started to aggressively advertise on facebook etc. I have had messages, emails and telephone conversations with Sunny Jain , M.S. (Molecular Medicine and Cell Biology) – the founder and CEO. His Linked In profile. and crunchbase profile Like me and my multiple sites, his business grew out of personal family issues with the microbiome.
Fortunately, there has been no NDA requested or “off the record” requests. I am a blogger, which means that I am also a Journalist (see this court ruling), thus whatever was share is technically free game.
Waiting for … from Sunny
The following is an existing request to him:
An example of some of their 16s samples with the probiotic mixture generated for each. Sample to be in ‘ubiome json’ format
Why? We are using different methods and our recommendations may be radically different.
This may open up a can of worms — I can provide citations for all of my recommendations to show my logic. SunGenomics may be working off a lot less citations.
Requests to Sunny
Can you custom mix probiotics from a formula created and sent from my site? This would solve a lot of challenges people have.
No, the issue of liability if they do not come up with the formula based on their analysis. This explanation makes no sense.
Can you provide single strain probiotics, especially for strains where there are no single source providers on the market?
He is looking at it. Probiotics are very high markup.
Another struggling Ubiome?
The financial basis of the company is Venture Capital (the same type of situation that drove Ubiome into ‘pushing things‘ to satisfy the venture capitalists.
For myself and my sites — it is totally self funding (i.e. my own wallet and paycheck from the day job); old school ‘garage startup‘. Garage startup worked for Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. (Reference).
SunGenomics was founded in 2016, Sunny and his wife are scientists (I do not believe either are physicians) working full time for the firm. There are 11 people showing on the team page. Three million divided by 11 over 3 years, means $90,000/employee. Translation: they may be running financially lean/under-funded/over-grown. A scenario similar to Ubiome. Sunny indicated that the team is stretched/stressed (a.k.a. under-staffed)
Speculation On Internal Process
Their technology appears overhyped and may be using alternative wordings to obfuscate what they do. This can be a good marketing ploy — their direct competitors use different terms — hence they are doing something different!
Some key points, they use a patented technology. There is no claim of having the patent on it. This will be missed by most people who will conclude that it is THEIR patented technology – it’s wordsmithing! They also emphasis “DNA” excessively, I believe it is actually rDNA (i.e. 16s)
Correction: Sunny emailed, they are not using 16s (72K) but Whole Genome Microbial Sequencing (2421). The numbers are the number of articles using each term on PubMed. 16s is more common and have had many more studies.
” In summary, our study demonstrates that WGS has multiple advantages compared with the 16S rRNA amplicon method including enhanced detection of bacterial species, increased detection of diversity and increased prediction of genes. “
At 1888 species vs 3239 species, the differences appear to be major — the reality is that apart from names — we know almost nothing about how to increase or decrease these additional bacteria. For our purposes at hand, it gives academic knowledge but not practical clinical knowledge, IMHO.
Given the expressed concerned over liabilities; I believe they are ultra-conservative (a.k.a. Standard of Care) in their suggestions. I would not be surprised if their selection of probiotic strains and application to each consumer is just a rehash of information from either of these two excellent guides prepared by Dragana Skokovic-Sunjic .
These guides ranks what we know about each probiotic in a solid objective manner. I strongly recommend them.
Bottom Line
I have reservations about using this firm. If someone out there wishes to give them a trial ($800 to do below!l, I would love to get the following for a followup post:
Ubiome done from the same sample that is shipped to them.
List of probiotic strains in the probiotic delivered to them
Their report on your sample
Ubiome done on a followup same sample that is shipped to them.
Their report on your followup sample
I see too much risk of ‘resampling until you get positive results’ to report to the customer to show that an impact was made (a.k.a. Repeat business – which is what Venture Capitalist are looking for!). This risk is expected whenever a venture capitalist is backing a company.
I would love to give a thumbs up to this firm — conceptually it is on target. However I am an evidence based person and well aware of the reality of venture capitalist backed firm from years in Information Technology. Until there is evidence — I must give a thumbs down because of the costs involved and the risk of not targeting the entire microbiome due to following a conservative approach.
UPDATE – Oct 4, 2019
From a Facebook post: Content is from Sunny
This is interesting (putting on a M.B.A. hat), he indicates 1000 customers have used their service. Venture capitalist investment $3,000,000. That amounts to $3000 per customer to date. In an earlier post on Facebook he estimates well less than 1% repeat customers. My gut feeling is that this may follow the path of uBiome — a Venture Capitalist road to Chapter 7. I am old school and believe that a garage based start up without venture capitalists is the wiser path, especially for an emerging marketproduct. It worked for Dell, Amazon, HP, Apple.
A few will have a link to bacteria impacted by it.
Stage #1 Complete
Stage #2 will be similar to what I did for probiotic mixtures — if there are multiple flavonoids in the suggestions, then the foods containing them will be examined and a relative weighing of the foods will be done (Take, Mix, Avoid).
I have updated the database with this information and also revised a few pages. If you are interested in seeing how you matches, here are the steps:
Logon and go to your samples page. Click Condition Templates
On the next page, click Fibromyalgia:
The next page will list ALL of the bacteria associated, your values and reference values.
If you have none reported, a Zero is shown.
One of the problems with most studies is they report on the average of a sample — not every person matches. Also the definition of “high” or “low” can be subjective and also dependent on the population being used.
What Can you do about it?
If you look at the Custom Suggestions page, there is a special drop down box. If you set it to Fibromyalgia then the suggestions will be done only for this subset of bacteria,
Chatting with a friend this evening, I realized that I could easily add this information to the Reference Library page for each bacteria. Usually this will appear at the genus or family level. A few examples:
CFS Remission 