One nice thing about this claim: it should be easily testable. In fact, someone could test it themselves; score yourself on a Big Five inventory, if you're >75% N, make some capsules with probiotics (I believe they come in powders so this is easy), take them blind, go to a party or other social interaction, and self-rate how stressed you are.
Do you expect it to be that quick acting? The study seemed to be what they ate the last 30 days, so I imagined an effect that slowly built up. At the very last some time should be allowed for the bacteria to reach the gut and start colonizing it I think? Also with regards to parties, my experience is that alcohol can affect the gut flora.
The dose can be taken in the morning, given it much of the day to act. Acute effects seem plausible here given the neural connection to the gut, however, a self-experiment examining acute effects only is still useful to help rule that out. And to investigate slower effects, you can block the doses so instead you take a week (or a month) at a time (this is more work because you need more blocks to achieve similar numbers of units as a per-day randomization).
> my experience is that alcohol can affect the gut flora.
So? You don't know if the alcohol effect would be to enhance or reduce the supposed calming effect or not affect that at all.
Sure; just note you won't be proving fermented foods lessen social anxiety -- at most you can conclude that consuming kimchi does it.
It's pretty good so you're not at loss anyways! I find sauerkraut enjoyable too, vegetables are too bland for me, a little bit of this stuff is a sauce replacement for me.
Unless you know a vegetarian, you may have trouble finding gel capsules sufficient for a decent dose of kimchi... (Also, now you have to refrigerate all your capsules.) Easier to just use some probiotic powder stable at room-temperature unless there's some compelling reason to expect them to be ineffective.
Only if you can find some non-fermented placebo kimchi that looks and tastes just the same, otherwise it ruins the blindness of the experiment. Hmm, Placebo Kimchi sounds like a good name for a band :)
I don't see how one person's blinded self-experimentation would yield more knowledge in this case, as the proposed experiment is not methodologically sound and as the data would not tell you anything more about the effect - as far as I can tell, anyway.
Except that's unblinded so placebo would probably dominate over actual effects. You'd have to make a placebo pill as well and not know which one you were taking until after you gather all your results.
That is what I meant, yes. Please forgive me for not including a full description of my self-blinding method in a quick comment.
> until after you gather all your results.
Not all of them; you only need to be blinded for each unit. Once the data is collected for that unit, then you can unblind yourself (and this is the easiest way to go).
