Insight
Zeevi: Identical foods cause vastly different glucose spikes across individuals
“So two people eating the same loaf of white bread, one would really spike their glucose and one would really stay flat. And that's true even if you normalize the responses to the responses to glucose. So you have just to see if, so, so, so even foods are not c…”
Insight
Zeevi: Fecal transplants work for depleted microbiomes but may fail in healthy guts
“Fecal transplants have been used, they, their claim to fame is by treating Clostridium difficile infections... You indeed transplant stool into these people, and that transplant works mainly because their microbiome is so depleted and it's like, you know, cult…”
Assertion Contradicted
Zeevi: Modern daily sugar consumption equals annual sugar intake in 1700
“The annual consumption in 1700 is the daily consumption today.”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Gut microbes metabolize red meat carnitine into atherosclerosis-causing TMAO
“They looked at carnitine, which is a compound that is found in red meat. This carnitine is metabolized by the microbiome to form TMA. It's a compound. TMA is then oxidized in the liver to form TMAO, and TMAO causes a reduce in reverse cholesterol transport and…”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Mice receiving obese twin microbiomes become obese on identical diets
“They took pairs of twins that were discordant for obesity. One twin obese and one twin was... And they transplanted their microbiome into germ-free mice. Germ-free mice are mice that are born and raised in sterile conditions, and they don't have a gut microbio…”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Obesity surged exactly when federal guidelines pushed carbs over dietary fat
“And if you look at their stats, you can see that people did consume more carbs and less fat. And just when they started consuming more carbs and less fat, did this epidemic of obesity and diabetes begin?”
Assertion Partly supported
Zeevi: Specific bacterial genomic region correlates with being 15 pounds thinner
“People who have this region in their, the genome of their microbiome are about 15 pounds thinner than people who don't have this region.”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Algorithmically personalized diets successfully normalized blood glucose peaks in clinical trials
“In the bad week, we saw huge glucose peaks for most people. Some that if you were a physician, you would look at and you would say this person is a pre-diabetic, and these peaks completely normalized during the good week. And for some people, the difference be…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zeevi: Maintaining metabolic health likely requires reducing blood glucose spikes
“In order to maintain health or to restore the, that the healthy phenotype, what you need to do is to probably reduce the glucose responses.”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Adding butter to bread lowers blood glucose spikes for most people
“Actually, fewer people had a high response to bread and butter than to bread alone.”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Carbohydrate counting is a surprisingly poor predictor of glucose responses
“If you take the correlation between the carbs and the meal and the postpranding glucose response of the meal, you get a correlation and R of .38, which is not a very good correlation.”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Machine learning predicts blood glucose responses better than carb counting
“Overall we had the 137 features after feature selection on 40 something thousand meals, and we ran this prediction, and this prediction got us to an R of .68 compared to the previous .38, and this R of .68 is pretty close to the to the .7 that we get when we l…”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Tripling bread intake did not significantly change gut microbiomes
“Usual bread consumption over this cohort of the big cohort that we did and over this 20 people cohort was about 10% of daily calories came from bread. In this study, we upped Their dose to over 25, 30% of their calories. And despite this change, this significa…”
Opinion
Zeevi: Gut bacteria producing butyrate is more beneficial than butyrate supplements
“I think that that you would gain more from, you know, having a bacterium that metabolizes things that you eat, and, you know, fiber that you eat into butyrate than eating butyrate directly.”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Travel shifts gut bacterial abundance, not presence or absence
“You get this distribution of bacteria in your gut. That even when you go someplace else, it changes in abundance, but it doesn't change in presence or absence, so it bumps us back when you get to a different place.”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Four out of ten U.S. adults are obese
“Right now, four out of 10 U.S. Adults are obese.”
Assertion Partly supported
Zeevi: Diabetes-related costs in the U.S. totaled $250 billion in 2012
“Two hundred and fifty billion dollars spent on diabetes and its related costs in 2012.”
Assertion Supported
Zeevi: Gut Microbes Carry 3 Million Genes, 150x the Human Genome
“And this, these microbes have a 150 times more genes than are in the human genome. They have about three million genes.”
