Researchprobiotics uses a scientific and research based approach to amass and organize the latest human microbiome research, analyze the latest data, and to evaluate the probiotic and prebiotic products available to consumers. And we need your help!
The microbiome is a complex and important part of the human ecosystem. The study of human flora has shown very promising possibilities for managing epigenetics and improving so many faucets of human life. There are so many possible health benefits to managing our flora, but bad products, quackery, poor scientific method, and downright false marketing of consumer products are diluting the ground-breaking work of real scientists.
We have two goals here.
- To aid this scientific endeavor, our goal is to gather, review, and maintain an annotated database of relevant microbiota research.
- To help consumers make science-based evaluations of consumer products relating to the microbiome. Our long term goal is to institute independent lab testing of as many off-the-shelf pre- and probiotics as possible. Most probiotic products don't contain anywhere near the number of active bacteria advertised, and one study, which sequenced the genes in 14 probiotic products, found that only one actually contained all the advertised strains.
To achieve our goals, we need your help. You can help aid scientific progress in this field right when it is most crucial. Create an account so that you can:
- Contribute annotations for recent scientific articles
- Contribute to our list of articles which require annotation
- Check that the articles we have linked to are reliable, unsponsored, and peer reviewed and that the links work
- Help police the scientific claims of articles written for consumers
- Run your own scientific self-experiment through American Gut or uBiome, and tell us the results, or contribute your ideas for experiments
- Download and find patterns in the data from large samples of gut bacteria, as soon as the data is released
- Evaluate off-the-shelf probiotics with our (soon to be developed) distributed lab techniques
