I've encountered a fair bit of research and anecdotal stories showing how gut bacteria can have all sorts of crazy effects. It really makes you wonder how many

I've encountered a fair bit of research and anecdotal stories showing how gut bacteria can have all sorts of crazy effects. It really makes you wonder how many conditions could be prevented or treated by dietary changes and supplements. I already wrote this in a response, but Mikhaila Peterson really opened up my eyes to the big impact diet can have on your health. To anyone that hasn't heard of her, she switched to a carnivore diet and many of her severe lifelong symptoms appear to have gone away. Recently I started considering the possibility that being fat could actually a symptom in some people. Controlling your weight is really easy when you're fairly healthy, but when you're sick it can become much more challenging. I used to be fairly critical of fat people, thinking that it was laziness, but I think the numbers are just too large to chalk it up exclusively to any single thing. There's also a lot of fat people that work incredibly hard and they excel at tons of things, which brings the laziness hypothesis to question. It's entirely possible that laziness plays a role in some, but when you take a high-resolution view of the world it's rare to find single-variable answers to complex problems. We also know that your mouth bacteria can have a huge impact on your dental health. There's people that barely have to brush their teeth to maintain perfect dental health, and others that still manage to get cavities despite following fairly rigorous routines such as brushing and flossing after every meal. I'll note it's been a few years since I last looked into this claim so take this comment with a grain of salt. Trying out probiotics seems fairly safe and it could have hugely positive effects on your health. The sibling comments from theprotocol are just one example. To add an anecdote, I recently started taking probiotics and the first thing I noticed after a few days was that I no longer felt tired after eating. I've experienced a few other positive changes, but I haven't been taking them for long enough to feel confident that those changes can be attributed exclusively to the probiotics. My biggest issue with probiotics is that finding good information about different products is fairly difficult. I basically just picked a box at random out of all the choices available. Does anyone have suggestions of good book on this topic? I've seen The Mind-Guy Connection and The Good Gut floated around a bit, but they have mixed reviews and the scientific rigor behind some of their claims seems to be under question.