July 23, 2026
“Probiotics for depression are neither a fraud nor a treatment – they are a third-line adjunct with a near coin-flip trial record and no strain a clinician can responsibly name.”
“The most informative number in this paper is the one that failed to reach significance: species diversity in depressed patients was indistinguishable from controls, and diagnosis explained 5.6% of who lived in their gut.”
“The ketogenic arm won by 2.2 points; the control arm won by being something the patient was still doing six weeks later.”
“The dividing line between a legal supplement claim and an illegal drug claim is not the biology – it is the grammar.”
“A group with a psychiatric hospital, an ADOS-2-confirmed cohort and six months of contact declined to claim that diet and probiotics changed autism – because their design could not support it, and that refusal is the contribution.”
“A paper that says the Mediterranean pattern earns its place, the DASH diet does not yet, and the microbiome is probably involved is giving you something no commercial gut-health course ever will: the shape of its own uncertainty.”