We've lost something we can't eat our way back to
Researchers studying Hadza and Yanomami communities found greater gut microbial diversity than in the industrialized populations they compared them with. Those differences help us understand the microbial diversity that industrialized life may be depleting. [→ Schnorr 2014] [→ Clemente 2015] Three generations of industrial food, antibiotics, and sterile environments did it.
The part that matters: diet alone may not rebuild it. The Sonnenburg lab fed mice a low-fiber diet across four generations. When they reintroduced fiber at generation four, diversity didn't come back. The microbes weren't dormant. They were gone, and the ecosystem could no longer process the fiber the way a healthy one would. [→ study]
More fiber is good. But if the machinery to use it is missing, more fiber isn't enough.
So if diet can't rebuild a depleted gut on its own, what can?
Fiber is fuel for beneficial bacteria, and fuel does nothing when the ecosystem that burns it is gone.
One intervention has done remarkable things. And it's stool.
Fecal microbiota transplantation, the transfer of a healthy donor's stool into a depleted gut, has produced documented effects in published research, from C. difficile [→ van Nood 2013] to findings that reach the metabolic [→ Vrieze 2012], neurological and immune systems. → Evidence Library
FMT is used only for recurrent C. difficile, under FDA oversight; the rest is research-stage. We're showing you what the science established, not making a claim about what ThaenaBiotic does.
It works. For years, though, no one was sure why.
The active part isn't the bacteria. It's the chemistry.
This is the hinge. Everyone assumed FMT worked because live bacteria moved in and took up residence. Then, in 2017, a team sterilized donor stool, filtering out every living organism, and used only what remained: the metabolites and signaling molecules. It still worked. [→ study]
The implication is the entire idea behind ThaenaBiotic: the value is in what the bugs make.
If it's the chemistry and not the bugs, can you bottle the chemistry?
A lab ran a gut bacterium through a 121-degree autoclave cycle and human cells still responded to the powder. What that does to the story that probiotics work because they are alive.
You can't synthesize it. So we preserved it.
A healthy gut produces more than a thousand distinct metabolites in concert, and that profile tracks microbial composition far more than host genetics [→ Zierer 2018]. You can't manufacture that from scratch, any more than you can make synthetic blood. There's too much complexity. The only source of the real thing is a real, healthy human gut.
So we built the process to capture it: screen for the rarest healthy donors (fewer than 1% qualify), pool them for a more complete signature, sterilize to clinical standards, and measure what survives: on an untargeted panel of 1,043 metabolites, 853 were detected, and nothing found in the live material was lost through sterilizing and drying. Then we put it in a shelf-stable capsule.
That's ThaenaBiotic: a sterilized human postbiotic, no clinical procedure required. The chemistry of a healthy gut, preserved and verified.
ThaenaBiotic® is a dietary supplement. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. A few people shouldn't take it. See the product page for who.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. ThaenaBiotic® is a dietary supplement. The research summarized on these pages describes the science behind our approach; it does not describe what ThaenaBiotic does for any person or condition.