I'm a believer in the importance of the microbiome, but this study seems fishy:<p>* the authors have already started a company and pursued a patent on their ayurvedic-derived formulation<p>* the figure 1(a) in their paper (<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-25382-z#Fig1" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-25382-z#Fig1</a>) doesn't show a big difference from plain probiotics to their formulation, but does show some oddities in the Y-axis where, for the control group, there were clearly exactly just 10 flies' mortality measured (integer steps down), but apparently many, many more for other cases scaled to the 0-10 axis.<p>* it's unclear if the treatments/evaluations where blinded – the word 'blind' is not found in the Nature article<p>* the 1st comment on the Nature article wonders: "the control flies didn't live to their normal expected age or even close. What gives?"<p>(Perhaps the flies that lived longer just had more food in total?)