Rethinking Health: Your Microbiome, Decoded

You’ve probably taken a probiotic. Or at least wondered if you should. The gut microbiome has become one of the most talked-about topics in health, showing up in gastroenterology journals, wellness podcasts, and the supplement aisle at your local pharmacy. If you’ve looked into it at all, you’ve likely hit a wall of conflicting information and products making very large promises.

Some of those promises are grounded in legitimate science. A lot of them aren’t. And the gap between the two is exactly what this conversation is about.

Since the beginning, the goal for Rethinking Health has been to cut through the noise on health topics that matter. Few topics need that more than the microbiome: a field where the science is genuinely exciting, still early, and where companies have raced far ahead of what the evidence actually supports.

Dr. Abhi Pandey is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, where he studies the role of diet and the gut microbiome in patients with blood cancers. He trained at NYU, where he researched the gut microbiome’s role in how patients respond to immunotherapy. He has given versions of this talk to academic audiences and popular ones alike, and he’s going to give it to us.

The conversation will cover:

What the microbiome is, and why diversity matters

What makes it change, and what you can actually do to influence it

What to eat — and what not to eat — based on the evidence we have

How to spot the companies that are overpromising

What we still don’t know, and where the research could take us

Come for dinner. Leave with a better filter for one of the noisiest topics in health.

Dr. Abhishek (Abhi) Pandey moved to the USA from India and grew up mostly in Arizona. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago before going to the Georgetown University School of Medicine for his medical doctorate as well as a Master's of Science in Bioinformatics. He then completed his Internal Medicine residency at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine before completing a fellowship in Hematology & Medical Oncology at the University of Colorado. While at NYU, Dr Pandey was mentored by the late Jeffrey Weber, MD, PhD and studied the role of the gut microbiome in immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment responses and side effects. During fellowship, he continued his bioinformatics-focused research in the microbiome as well as learning single cell analysis techniques in blood cancers. Here at the University of Miami, Dr. Pandey works closely with Tracy Crane, PhD and the CRANE lab as well as Ola Landgren, MD, PhD and the Myeloma Genomics Lab to study the impact of specific dietary interventions on the gut microbiome and circulating pool of immune cells in patients with myeloma precursor disease as well as newly diagnosed multiple myeloma. Dr. Pandey speaks English, conversational Hindi, and conversational Spanish