1. I stopped drinking heavily and using other drugs, i.e. marijuana
2. managed my diet to avoid heartburn without medication
3. schedule my meals so it was easier to sleep at night (always eat something for breakfast when I wake up)
I did not need any "poo infusion" or anything.
I had a gal bladder removal that didn't fix the problems the doctors thought it would and got a lot smarter about the kinds and variety of food I eat.
I believe alcohol in particular was really screwing up my gut biome and entire digestive system.
theorem of indirection, i guess.
Heavy alcohol use and marijuana are both known to impact memory and recall directly.
Discontinuing both of those explains changes in memory. Attributing this to microbiome changes does not follow.
The association between gut microbiota and cognitive decline: A systematic review of the literature
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027153172...
It shows ”Gut microbiota modulation improves cognition in adults with early impairment. Diet, probiotics, and fecal microbiota transplantation share mechanistic pathways and that evidence clarifies how microbiota-targeted strategies support cognitive health.”
The action could be explained due to an anti inflammatory action by the gut biome.
That paper commits one of the major sins of many microbiome papers which is to attribute all benefits of diet change to the microbiome. Like the parent commenter it gets drawn to the idea that all changes in the body can be traced back to the microbiome and assumes that it explains everything, but that’s obviously not true.
However, when someone is taking two powerful substances with direct brain action and known modulators effects on memory, blaming anything else in the body is bad logic.
And who said they don't do this (long term) exactly through their affecting the gut microbiome?
They do not exert their primary effects via microbiome modulation. This is obvious because the effects occur nearly immediately upon consumption, whereas microbiome change from what you consume is a gradual process.
The question I have is: Why has microbiome become the explanation for everything? What would lead you to believe that microbiome would be the explanation for this, when the direct action upon the brain is so much more direct and obvious? Microbiome is an interesting area of research but how did we get to this point where some are ignoring the obvious and trying to construct alternative microbiome based explanations for things like alcohol and marijuana impairing memory?
Which is orthogonal as to whether those direct actions also affect long term memory.
>They do not exert their primary effects via microbiome modulation.
Who said anything about primary effects?
Might the reason be that we're constantly finding new important ways it affects things, or that we see major changes to seemingly orthogonal issues from targetting the gut microbiome directly?
But I've been able to cut for months at a time. Whenever the cut happens, I feel my brain sort of "return" roughly a week or two in.
I'm not sure how to explain it other than something like fog clearing. Obviously makes some intuitive sense when you read it.
However, as someone that has consumed alcohol somewhat regularly (sometimes more, sometimes less) since college, it's bizarre to think about that consumption in retrospect. In effect, years and years of "fog" - it makes me wonder how different or similar life would have been without that fog.
Can't change the past now, but a data point and strong signal for the future.
(less/no simple sugars, much more vegetables and starches/fibers, regularly eating 4 corn/20 plant oatmeal few times a week)
What does this mean?
Here's the recipe. I'm using norwegian 5-grain oatmeal that has oats, wheat, barley, rye and spelt:
Recipe: Use two parts oatmeal (either 4-korn or 5-korn). Add one part nut mix and one part seed mix. So for 50 g of oats, add 25 g of nuts and 25 g of seeds.
Seeds: 30% flaxseed 30% chia 20% pumpkin seeds 20% sesame
Nuts: 4 parts walnuts 2 parts pecans 1 part Brazil nuts
P.S.: since most of these ingredients are pretty cheap (oatmeal used to be poor mans food), you can upgrade to Eco versions of these and get much better taste, without going that much up in price. Especially nuts.
Also, I have the nutmix and seed mix pre blended in 2 liter jars, so that I only have to mix them once a month or two.
I had an infection and was prescribed antibiotics, and needed to pause the esomeprazole. I asked gemini about it and it suggested I take two probiotics while on the antibiotics, Saccharomyces boulardii and Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG. I noticed after a few days that I wasn't getting heartburn, and started putting the pieces together.
After the antibiotics ended, with still no heartburn, it recommend I add rhamnosus gg to the mix. So now I take all three daily and rarely get heartburn. It's been quiet a shock
Foods to eat, oatmeal, lentils.
Ginger tea, activated charcoal tabs.
Most all of that works very well to support gut bacteria so throwing some probiotics in as well can help. The gummy kind available in generic or Digestive Advantage work well!
I even once read that someone noticed an issue they tried to clear up for years with doctors went away on day 3 of a water fast. No, he wasn't going to fast forever. But he was shocked the first relief he ever had was that day. From there he solved his problem once his eyes were opened a bit.
I'd personally try all ground beef for a week or two. It won't kill you. Is it ideal? Probably not. But you will not have any problems from that short trial. Then add things slowly until you have a whole good diet you like.
Look into low-FODMAP diets if you haven't already.
For example
>I stopped drinking heavily and using other drugs, i.e. marijuana
Like the primary change you made was to cut out using a whole bunch of drugs with known, significant neurological effects.
Wow, it must be those gut microbes!
Here's a study that tried fecal transplants to treat mental illness (and found no effect): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41785480/
The pattern with this stuff is that, when a blinded study is carried out, there's usually no effect.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12536323/
It also found the effect was greater in people with IBS.
The positive result is heavily driven by an outlier study on Fibromyalgia that has results that look a little too suspicious relative to the other studies.
This is basic ecology, the bacterial population dynamics in your colon are a direct result of substrate availability. If it’s primarily fiber, polyphenols, and other indigestible plant compounds reaching the colon you’ll likely have a healthy microbiome. If instead you malabsorb food from poor lifestyle factors and have macronutrients reaching the colon they’ll probably fuel blooms of pathogens. I think microbiome researchers need to talk with ecologists more to help advance the field out of the myopia it’s in.
FMT does appear useful for special cases of infection like c-diff, but I think that’s led people to believe it’s a generally health promoting practice, when the research simply does not show it.
Sure, you have to put in a lot of effort to get the system starting, but eventually the feedback loop pays dividends that outweigh the principal.
Everything else about the human body seems to be this way, adaptation or maladaptation.
im talking about impacting your microbiome through another animal, not the short term effects from aerobic exercise or BDNF and what that feels like. this experience didnt hit quite like other typical metabolic functions.
great to hear you like BDNF. we all could use more of that.
Meanwhile, you suggest that such microbial influence must be reason you feel calm right after riding your horse.
I don't think I need to further explain why it's a ridiculous claim.
Exactly how negative it is though is difficult to determine and probably varies from person to person.
It must be the case that these microbes need the subject to be aware of their presence! Maybe the microbes have consciousness, and for the treatment to work, the microbes' consciousness has to entangle (via quantum mechanisms) with the subject's consciousness? Blind studies prevent this quantum entanglement to form, that's why the treatment stops working. We definitely need more research in this direction!
Also one issue with all of these studies is they only look at averages and don't do subgroup analysis. It may be that a few patients have an underlying condition causing depression that is highly responsive to these interventions, while it has no effect on the others.
One day people will figure out how to use these correctly.
Serotonin in the gut doesn’t go to your brain. It serves a different function in the gut.
The brain synthesizes serotonin inside of the brain. It doesn’t come from your gut.
I think the fecal transplants help to essentially seed your gut with healthy bacteria, which makes adapting to the proper diet easier when your body isn't constantly fighting you.
If you're interested in digging into the people that were doing this, they had a website dedicated to everyone telling their stories of how they went about their own individual journeys.
The website was called thepowerofpoop.com and looks like it's gone now, but is available on the wayback machine including individual articles and images.
I would go back to at least 2022 .. I think they possibly got in legal trouble at some point and started taking things down.
Microbiome transplant therapy is a domain full of grifters right now who will push it to vulnerable populations desperate for hope, like parents of autistic children. The real research results are much less promising for difficult conditions.
More recently, a study finds The modulation of the gut microbiota using MTT in ASD has shown beneficial and long-term effects on GI symptoms and core symptoms of autism[3]
[1] https://gutbrainaxistherapeutics.com/pipeline/#clinical-tria...
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40168-016-0225-7
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19490976.2025.24...
And nobody is bothered by the story. And it gets less clicks. People get cranky when they have been suckered.
This factoid is repeated everywhere but it’s misleading without knowing that gut serotonin is a different pool than brain serotonin and they have different functions.
The brain synthesizes its serotonin locally within the brain.
The fact that we both use Salesforce does not matter. It’s internal and doesn’t mean anything outside the company. Both the brain and gut re-used the molecule for their own internal signaling. Evolutionarily it was cheaper to use an existing molecule.
To the brain, the invoice is just “I’m full” or “I’m hangry.” It doesn’t care how much serotonin the gut had to produce internally to issue that “invoice.” The brain will produce its own serotonin from the signal of satiety but it won’t give you any more than you can from just feeling full.
It is like these armchair scientists don't understand that the actual scientists know the limits of the model system better than they do.
Science depends on accurately reporting facts, being clear about the limits of your findings, and seeking explanations that survive scrutiny. Science journalism has other priorities that are often in conflict with those of science.