#135 Myths About Probiotics and the Microbiome with Raja Dhir

Raja Dhir (0:00)

And at the end of the day, there's a really set kind of guidelines for probiotics or organisms with probiotic potential. And in this case, you really want to see that the strains have been tested, right, in some meaningful way across a wide range of a population with a defined output. And so what's happened is that the term is usually mistaken for anything that's a bacteria, that's a lactobacillus or bifidobacterium or a streptococcus that's fermented.

And maybe some of those things have a benefit, maybe those things don't, but kind of the next level of probiotic research is really defining the term and saying, hey, this isn't just kind of a supplement category, this is really the introduction of bacteria and it can have tremendous effects.

SPEAKER_2 (0:46)

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Siim Land (0:54)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (0:55)

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Siim Land (1:00)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm Hoseim Land and our guest today is Raja Dhir. Raja is a scientist and entrepreneur in the world of microbiome and gut health. He's the co-founder of the company SEED. He's on the editorial board of the journal Microbiome and he sits on the advisor committee.

Raja, welcome to the show.

Raja Dhir (1:21)

Thank you for having me.

Siim Land (1:24)

Yeah, I'm glad to have you on the show and the world of the microbiome is very fascinating and something that scientists constantly learning new things about. Maybe before we get into that, can you give us a brief background about your education and how did you get into the world of the microbiome?

Raja Dhir (1:42)

The first time I ever heard about the microbiome was in 2006 And it was when I read a paper, a scientific paper showing that when you transplant the microbiome, which just for people that aren't familiar with the term, it's the collection of organisms that are in and on the human body. These microbes are microscopic organisms. If you change from an obese person to a lean person, then their phenotype changes quite rapidly and is wholly reversible through microbiome modulation. I always like to joke that if you want someone to pay attention for something, then just show that it reverses aging or makes them less fat and all of a sudden, it becomes a popularized field, but really that was the first shot heard around the world. I did my undergraduate studies in biology and at the time, the microbiome as a field didn't really exist.

So, everything that you hear, read, all the trials that you see, all these things are really less than a decade old. If you think about what happened with the genomics revolution, it's something that's happening very similarly here where the tools and the technologies are getting a lot more sophisticated and we're at that corner where we're turning these big data sets into actionable therapies for people.

So, I've been tracking the field for a very long time, my professional career is in tech transfer and development and so things, scale up of bacteria is kind of considered to be the highest form of development. So it's not only stabilization, but it's also fermentation cultures. It's also how do you get it shelf stable at ambient temperature? How do you make sure that the viability of the organism is maintained?

And so before starting seed, which is now our company, it is a microbiome company that's only focused on this world. I obsessed for over a decade after school on how to actually grow these organisms. And we've done a lot of really interesting scale up things so far.

Siim Land (3:58)

Where did you get your education from?

Raja Dhir (4:00)

From the University of Southern California.

Siim Land (4:02)

Okay, that's cool.

Yeah, like, it's a very, you know, fascinating world. And they used, I believe, like they used to say that you as a person or a superorganism consist of like 90% of bacteria and only 10% human cells. So but but I've seen that the number is kind of skewed more towards like 70% bacteria and now it's like 50 to 60%. So how many like different non human species live inside us?

Raja Dhir (4:28)

So by cell count, the most recent estimate has 38 or so a little over 38 trillion organisms living in the body. Now most of those cluster quite well into between 100 and 150 different species, which underneath the species level, you're going to find an inordinate amount of diversity at the strain level. So there's a lot of diversity. But for the most part, what the most interesting findings is that even when you look at in at populations from all around the world that have never come in contact with it with one another, indigenous populations, non-modern or non-Western populations, Amazonian tribes, Hadza, oftentimes you'll find that, you know, at the genus level, a lot of the microbial diversity is it's called conserved.