I’m putting the post about Lumina Probiotics back up, now edited to avoid any possible threats of libel. To explain, here’s a timeline of my last 72 hours.

1. I get an email Friday night from Aaron Silverbook, founder of Lumina, that says only “Hey Trevor; want to do a call?”. He follows up on Saturday afternoon.

2. I get an email Sunday afternoon (yesterday) with explanations of Lumina’s manufacturing, along with a legal threat. Email is reprinted verbatim below.

3. I agree to temporarily take the post down, post an update to my readers, and ask for a meeting to ask scientific questions. Aaron refuses my request to record the meeting, so I take notes instead and email them to him afterwards. As my last post indicates, Aaron mostly deferred scientific questions to his advisor, Justin Merritt, and his employee, Rob Williams. I send emails to both of them.

4. In the few hours after publishing my updates on Lumina, I get 4 comments on my post, one supportive, three negative. The supportive one is from Will Manidis, who’s been reading my blog for a while. One critical comment is from Aaron, and contains multiple factual inaccuracies, which I address below. Note that I was unable to refute them directly because he directly references the post that he requested I take down.

The other two critical comments are from people who I’ve never heard from before. On further research, one of them is from someone who subscribed to my Substack directly before commenting. They follow Lumina on Twitter. The other is from someone who doesn’t subscribe to my Substack, which is suspicious, because I didn’t share this post anywhere except to my subscribers.

5. Rob Williams writes me a long response to my email in which he dodges my main questions. I ask follow-up questions to get clarifications. He asks me “how I’d like to be served” and threatens me with “spending years in and out of a California courtroom” (full email printed below).

6. I get some advice from fellow bloggers and write this post.

Let’s hope Lumina’s threats are toothless. But yeah, I mostly just wanted this as the header image.

Why I’m now putting the post back up

I had my suspicions that Aaron did not want to engage in legitimate scientific debate, given that he did not respond to my email. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, though, even when he threatened legal action, refused to be recorded or in writing giving any responses, and deferred all scientific questions to his advisors.

However, given that he’s now said deliberately inaccurate things on my blog, I believe engaged his supporters to brigade my blog, and connected me with an employee who also threatened to sue me, I will no longer give him or Lumina the benefit of the doubt. I think Aaron and Lumina would rather their product claims be not submitted to scrutiny by anyone, and are willing to intimidate and lie in order to do so.

What I believe about Lumina Probiotics

I believe (note the libel-friendly phrasing) that:

1. Lumina’s manufacturing process follows legally mandated GMP protocols, if not the probiotic trade association’s voluntary best practices.

2. It is weird to be secretive about your manufacturing until pressed on it, especially when you have made a point of trying to evade regulations. See Zbiotics for a great example of how to behave responsibly and communicate openly when selling genetically modified bacteria for human health issues. It’s especially weird to threaten lawsuits when people ask follow-up questions about your manufacturing.

3. Lumina’s product is a drug, not a cosmetic product. And, regardless of whether it is a cosmetic product, it has the potential to cause great harm. This means it needs extensive human safety testing. This can be under the FDA or not.

4. There are scientific reasons to believe that Lumina’s product can be unsafe and ineffective in humans, based on the reasoning in my previous posts. This uncertainty can and should be resolved by careful, well-designed human trials, not by releasing the product into the wild.

5. It was wrong for Lumina to take money for the product, like they did in Honduras and in pre-orders, without doing proper testing.

6. Threats of lawsuits have no place in open scientific debate.