Naively, I would expect that the body of most top athletes is under a lot of stress and thus not the perfect candidates. On the other hand, being a top athlete is a hard-to-fake signal.
Currently, I have trouble finding the actual criteria on the website. I would expect that there’s little evidence for the metrics that are actually used to decide who happens to be a super donor, so it would be valuable to be more open about the assumptions that go into it.
HumanMicrobes.org donor criteria are listed on the Donors page. The specifics beyond those basic criteria are not listed for a variety of reasons, including, that they may change over time as we experiment and learn more, and that we need people to be honest with their applications.
You are definitely correct that many athletes may be doing harm by pushing themselves beyond what their body is naturally capable of.
I’ve screened hundreds of college and professional athletes at this point, including gold medalist Olympians. The vast majority of athletes don’t qualify or rank high.
Saying “A specific Bristol Stool Type” and not what stool type you are looking for seems to be the opposite of listing the desired criteria.
that they may change over time as we experiment and learn more
Generally, in science, it’s useful when the process of learning more about what criteria matter, is an open one where arguments about why certain criteria are believed to matter can be openly challenged and discussed.
I was also surprised on the large emphasis on top athlete, as opposed to simply athletes, and as opposed to generally very healthy people. My main opposition to looking at high athletes only is that I say many high performing people would waste their potential by becoming athletes, and that looking for athletes filters away many very healthy very high performing people.
For example I know someone who’s been high performing all his life, in kinda all domains (sports, socialising, technical skills, computer games...). He’d be top of class, also had strong motivation and work ethic which got him highest place in an entrance exam to the best engineering school of the country (main subjects being math, physics, engineering, algorithmics). He so rarely fell ill (less than once per several years) it was a shock for him when he did, for the 2 days it would last (to be precise, I’m using ill in a ‘ill enough to notice’ way, not just a runny nose in winter). He went on to cofound a still successful company in a technical sector (drones).
I dressed this portrait not to pitch that person to you particularly, but to illustrate that actually there’re a whole bunch of people with very similar portraits, all you’ll find them all concentrated in certain top engineering schools (there might be similar profiles in other similar top school of other domains but I don’t know those). Few of these people become top level athletes (often by preference for something else, though there’s also a higher percentage of top level athletes in that population) yet many would have the potential too. As long as we’re just basing microbiota transplants on the assumption “very healthy high performing people probably have good microbiota”, it makes sense to me to test more of these people for effectiveness in transplants.
Nobody is saying that only athletes are super donors. They are not. But beign a top athlete is a good proxy for being “exceptionally healthy”, and there are some studies supporting the claim that athletes are good donors.
That person you are describing sounds like a potential super donor! Can I get in touch with him? Can he reach out to Human Microbes?
Right, we probably largely agree with each other. I don’t dispute looking for super donors amongst top athletes, as that way you can do a unilateral search (ie. you find a list of top athletes and start asking). In the context of directly asking for recommendations, you gain the possibility of listing any criteria, that can be far more personal and less searchable, and you’ll gain access to populations you can’t through search. For example, if the criteria is “seems to never fall ill, recovers extremely quickly from illness or injury, highly active and motivated”, you can’t search for that but I can recommend the top people of my network that meet this criteria, and then you could interview them and get their recommendations along those criteria, and you move up those links to finding more and more healthy people.
I skimmed the one study on top athletes being better than less top athletes (the one with traditional martial arts ie. not martial arts but actually gymnastics) and was not particularly convinced it was a good basis (because of don’t trust one study, and because the critera for being a top athlete in an art+gymnastics competition might not be so objective as to strongly relate to gut microbia. I would have been more reassured if it was on powerlifting with a continuously rising correlation between weight lifted and ‘gut health’.
For the specific person I gave as example, he’ll be approaching mid thirties by now so though I strongly feel he’d be a very strong candidate at 25 (also the peak of his athletic performance), he seems less particularly appropriate now due to age and not practising sports as much in the last few years.
I don’t want to be a dead end either, I can forward this article to folks in that engineering school currently (who’ll be around 25) and see if there’s anyone interested enough that I could give you their contact details to continue from.
Naively, I would expect that the body of most top athletes is under a lot of stress and thus not the perfect candidates. On the other hand, being a top athlete is a hard-to-fake signal.
Currently, I have trouble finding the actual criteria on the website. I would expect that there’s little evidence for the metrics that are actually used to decide who happens to be a super donor, so it would be valuable to be more open about the assumptions that go into it.
HumanMicrobes.org donor criteria are listed on the Donors page. The specifics beyond those basic criteria are not listed for a variety of reasons, including, that they may change over time as we experiment and learn more, and that we need people to be honest with their applications.
Support for athletes as donors is listed here: http://humanmicrobiome.info/FMT#impact-factors
You are definitely correct that many athletes may be doing harm by pushing themselves beyond what their body is naturally capable of.
I’ve screened hundreds of college and professional athletes at this point, including gold medalist Olympians. The vast majority of athletes don’t qualify or rank high.
Saying “A specific Bristol Stool Type” and not what stool type you are looking for seems to be the opposite of listing the desired criteria.
Generally, in science, it’s useful when the process of learning more about what criteria matter, is an open one where arguments about why certain criteria are believed to matter can be openly challenged and discussed.
In my last reply, I’ve already listed multiple reasons why we don’t advertise the precise criteria. Did you see that?
Elsewhere, in more purely scientific settings, I definitely have discussed the exact criteria and the evidence for them.
Furthermore, these are arguably proprietary business trade secrets, yet I’ve made them public in order to try to advance this area of science.
You are right, that wasn’t smart. You want “Type 3” stool on the Bristol scala. That’s dry, firm stool. I edited the post accordingly.
Please see my response to the person you’re replying to.
I was also surprised on the large emphasis on top athlete, as opposed to simply athletes, and as opposed to generally very healthy people. My main opposition to looking at high athletes only is that I say many high performing people would waste their potential by becoming athletes, and that looking for athletes filters away many very healthy very high performing people.
For example I know someone who’s been high performing all his life, in kinda all domains (sports, socialising, technical skills, computer games...). He’d be top of class, also had strong motivation and work ethic which got him highest place in an entrance exam to the best engineering school of the country (main subjects being math, physics, engineering, algorithmics). He so rarely fell ill (less than once per several years) it was a shock for him when he did, for the 2 days it would last (to be precise, I’m using ill in a ‘ill enough to notice’ way, not just a runny nose in winter). He went on to cofound a still successful company in a technical sector (drones).
I dressed this portrait not to pitch that person to you particularly, but to illustrate that actually there’re a whole bunch of people with very similar portraits, all you’ll find them all concentrated in certain top engineering schools (there might be similar profiles in other similar top school of other domains but I don’t know those). Few of these people become top level athletes (often by preference for something else, though there’s also a higher percentage of top level athletes in that population) yet many would have the potential too. As long as we’re just basing microbiota transplants on the assumption “very healthy high performing people probably have good microbiota”, it makes sense to me to test more of these people for effectiveness in transplants.
Nobody is saying that only athletes are super donors. They are not. But beign a top athlete is a good proxy for being “exceptionally healthy”, and there are some studies supporting the claim that athletes are good donors.
That person you are describing sounds like a potential super donor! Can I get in touch with him? Can he reach out to Human Microbes?
Right, we probably largely agree with each other. I don’t dispute looking for super donors amongst top athletes, as that way you can do a unilateral search (ie. you find a list of top athletes and start asking). In the context of directly asking for recommendations, you gain the possibility of listing any criteria, that can be far more personal and less searchable, and you’ll gain access to populations you can’t through search. For example, if the criteria is “seems to never fall ill, recovers extremely quickly from illness or injury, highly active and motivated”, you can’t search for that but I can recommend the top people of my network that meet this criteria, and then you could interview them and get their recommendations along those criteria, and you move up those links to finding more and more healthy people.
I skimmed the one study on top athletes being better than less top athletes (the one with traditional martial arts ie. not martial arts but actually gymnastics) and was not particularly convinced it was a good basis (because of don’t trust one study, and because the critera for being a top athlete in an art+gymnastics competition might not be so objective as to strongly relate to gut microbia. I would have been more reassured if it was on powerlifting with a continuously rising correlation between weight lifted and ‘gut health’.
For the specific person I gave as example, he’ll be approaching mid thirties by now so though I strongly feel he’d be a very strong candidate at 25 (also the peak of his athletic performance), he seems less particularly appropriate now due to age and not practising sports as much in the last few years.
I don’t want to be a dead end either, I can forward this article to folks in that engineering school currently (who’ll be around 25) and see if there’s anyone interested enough that I could give you their contact details to continue from.
Wow, that would be fantastic if you forwarded this article to those folks! Thank you :)