What Your Gut Knows About Your Diet: The Science Of Food DNA With Dr. Sean Gibbons
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How does food DNA impact the human body? In what ways do ecological communities in the gut change and adapt to individual people over time? Join us in this episode as Dr. Sean Gibbons discusses a breakthrough method that analyzes food-derived DNA in fecal metagenomes – and what this means for human health…
Dr. Gibbon leads the Gibbons Lab at the Institute for Systems Biology, where he works to better understand and improve how the gut microbiome affects our health, utilizing a range of approaches, from hands-on experimentation to computer tools. His goal is to help create more personalized medical treatments. How? By accurately tracking dietary intake from gut microbiome samples and ultimately fostering better nutrition research and overall precision health.
Click play to find out:
- How the human microbiome influences our responses to diet, drugs, and more.
- What food DNA is, and where this idea comes from.
- The strongest driver of microbiome composition.
- How accurate dietary data is collected.
Dr. Sean Gibbons earned his Ph.D. in Biophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2015. He then completed postdoctoral training in Eric Alm’s lab in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT (2015–2018), where he developed techniques to measure how the human gut microbiome changes and evolves in individual people. He is now a full-time microbiome researcher and an Associate Professor at the Institute for Systems Biology.
Want to follow along with Dr. Gibbons’s work with Gibbons Lab? Click here now!
Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9C
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Forget frequently asked questions. |
| 0:02.3 | Common sense. |
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| 0:06.9 | 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified in license. |
| 0:11.3 | 5% go above and beyond. |
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| 0:14.8 | But only 0.1% are real geniuses. |
| 0:18.2 | Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. |
| 0:22.2 | He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. |
| 0:25.1 | Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. |
| 0:28.6 | Here come the geniuses. |
| 0:30.3 | This is the Finding Genius podcast with Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:37.5 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. |
| 0:41.2 | My guest today is Dr. Sean Gibbons. |
| 0:43.0 | He's an associate professor, part of the Institute for Systems Biology. |
| 0:46.4 | We're going to talk about food-derived DNA and the fecal metagenomes. |
| 0:51.2 | I guess perhaps a translation of that is the food we eat, you know, the DNA that |
| 0:55.7 | comprises the food, whether we meat, vegetable, whatever. I've always wondered this, where does it go |
| 1:00.3 | and does it affect us and does it interact with our DNA? So I think this may be a very, very interesting |
| 1:05.1 | call. So welcome with Sean. Thank you. Well, thanks for having me, Richard. Yeah, I don't know if I was right or not, but let's start with your background. So how did you get into this area of research? |
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