Bifidobacterium increased to 79%ile

A reader wrote:

Hello Ken,Your work is fantastic and continually raises the bar regarding the microbiome.This week I received my 3rd ubiome result over the span of approx 12 months.Prior to the most recent sample I followed the top few dietary suggestions based on my previous sample such as red wine, navy beans, thyme, red meat.Bifido has jumped to over 6% (although this may have been caused by massive amount of dark choc, up to 150 grams per day).In any event, overall the gut bacteria don’t appear to have significantly shifted and remain in a state of dysbiosis from what I can understand.Have you ever considered that perhaps the microbiome may be an outcome of an underlying issue? For instance I just received a hair tissue mineral analysis which revealed significant copper toxicity and some outcomes of copper toxicity include yeast, bacterial overgrowth, adrenal fatigue, etc.

Goal of this Post

For myself, I have seen the appearance that suggestions has been improving my own microbiome. The key word is appearance. The changes could be coincidental, placebo effects etc. For me, there is a sharp logic behind the suggestions; alternative approaches are based too often on hearsay.

So, in this post, I am going to review his results over time, also check if the recommendations have evolved from adding more data.

Items that lacked sufficient data to include in the analysis:

Metabolism for each report
Symptoms for each report

At a high level, we see no changes in summary template numbers over the time period,

Bifidobacterium – in the highest 25%!

Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes Ration went from 30%ile to 79%

Revisiting Suggestions for 1st Sample

Since symptoms were not available, I picked the outlier option (which did not exist a year ago) and got some results that may explain the slow progress aka poor suggestions:

Red wine and resveratrol are an interesting pair — usually the impact of the red wine is ascribed to resveratrol. There are other things in red wine, like tannic acid. When one shows up on the positive list and one on the negative list — it becomes a judgement call. My usual response when there is an apparent conflict is to not do either. The weight numbers are based on number of studies and not impact.

The reader also supplied mineral analysis with only copper appearing abnormal, but zinc was the third highest value (but in normal range).

Looking at Bifidobacterium deeper

It was interesting to see that Bifidobacterium longum was on the avoid list. So I decided to see his amounts and see that this one did decrease (while all Bifidobacterium increased)

We also see these changes:

Bottom Line

Come back often to check your suggestions must be emphasised. New data is constantly being added and the algorithms are being tuned.

Followup comments from reader

Some great insights. I will endeavour to make greater use of your site over next few days by adding more detail surrounding symptoms, etc.
Prior to my first sample I had been eating primarily plant based with high carb diet, lots of rice, oats, starchy root veg and low fat milk. Very minimal animal protein at that time.
Prior to most recent sample I had incorporated some of the suggestions daily such as red meat, navy bean, lots of dried thyme and herbs, cinnamon, red wine, etc.

As for the bifido increase, again I really believe it was large doses of 90% dark choc that caused this. Knowledge gained from your site!

Try to remember to enter your metabolism numbers from uBiome and your symptoms. Symptoms are now an option in building suggestions and are the most likely path to obtain observable results.

New Features to consider incorporating

Commercial probiotics are now explicitly included in the suggestions. Of the 166 products entered, only a single one was suggested (which can be obtained on Amazon and elsewhere).