6 ms·

Is Gut Science Biased?

87 points by tokenadult 10y ago

skilled 10y ago
Living in Southeast Asia, and countries like Nepal, that has taught me to honor my gut, and put inside of it only the things that it feels happy with, but needless to say, I still had to experience some of the worst shit-storms (literally) in my life, all because of mixing together bacteria from one food to the other -- I'm sure they could learn a lot from the Asian people. Experimenting with probiotics right now, and would love to hear about their effectiveness in a healthy diet.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kbutler 10y ago
  Anecdote != data, but I spent two years in Thailand a couple of decades ago, and took acidophilus supplements regularly. I seemed to have less frequent intestinal illness than many friends, but I did have the occasional, umm, "issues".
- tokenadult 10y ago
  You've heard about the most shocking defecation story related to Nepal, haven't you? United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal are thought to have been so lax in digging latrines in their camps that they introduced cholera to Haiti when stationed there after the earthquake there. Until then, the island of Haiti had never had a reported case of cholera, but now cholera is endemic in Haiti. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14641343 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=211434286 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2114342... http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2016/04/what_caused_haiti_s_cholera_epidemic_the_cdc_s_museum_knows_but_won_t_say.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
jerf 10y ago
It could even be the case... and bear with me here because this is a shocking idea... it could even by the case that things that are not necessarily reasons to self-flaggelate are involved too. It surely could be that we don't exercise enough and we are all fat flabbly slobs who need to be beaten until we are good little boys and girls, but it could also be that we have legitimate genetic differences and for all we know our Western ancestors from a thousand years ago would also have had a quite different gut biome than the people isolated in Asia. It could be that we eat starchy processed crappy crap and should apologize repeatedly to ourselves until we stop whipping ourselves which we shouldn't ever do, but it could also be that even a healthy Western diet still involves substantially different fruits, vegetables, leafs, meats, etc. from other diets what with being over 10,000 miles away and in radically different ecosystems even when they were totally wild. Maybe if we want to do real science and not just find exactly and only what we were looking for, as we go into this new domain that is basically entirely unexplored, we should try to do so with open eyes instead of decades-old preconceptions. Or it could just be that we're bad, bad people and should feel bad. (Sorry. Well, sorry-ish. This unrelenting stream of "You Suck And Everything About You Is Wrong And We're Going To Mention It At Every Opportunity" in the news is really getting on my nerves after 30+ years of it.)
- tacos 10y ago
  Exactly. Am I really to believe that people walking around in the time of Jesus were dropping off perfect #3 and #4s on the Bristol Stool Scale on a precise 24 hour cycle? And all that's different now because we have machines that make corn more digestible versus hitting it with a rock like we used to do? The human body is a magnificent contraption and you should listen to yours -- and not pundits. But people who are trying to "become one with their gut" are likely making themselves sick in other ways. There's way, way too much obsessive behavior around our bodies and it's not helpful. Easy to sell stuff to, though.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > Or it could just be that we're bad, bad people and should feel bad. Why is there always a value judgment assumed? Why are you creating a false dichotomy between "it's out of my control" and "I'm a bad person"?
taeric 10y ago
This reads like an overly cynical view of early stage experimentation. Will there be a lot of data that has to be simplified and ignored? Of course. That is almost by definition why we look at Calories and other proxy measures. This will not become a science when someone perfects the one experiment that can answer questions. It becomes a science when people ask questions that they can falsify in ways that other people can replicate. It continues to be a science as long as that is the case. Edit: I should point out that I misread the headline. I thought it was "Is Gut Science Based?" Not "Biased." .... so, I definitely had a more slanted reading of the article as I was going.
bitwize 10y ago
An example of this in action: Japanese people have bacteria in their guts which aid in the breakdown of the cellulose-rich nori in their diet -- which probably at least partially explains why if you're a Westerner unacclimated to Japanese cuisine and you go to a sushi bar, you may end up with a case of the sushits. But this was only discovered recently -- like a few years ago -- it never occurring to people before then that gut microbiomes could be so diverse as to have developed local variants to handle local cuisine. But there you go.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
entee 10y ago
The idea that Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD as stated in the article) studies are biased is both obvious and not necessarily entirely problematic. The reasons it's not so bad are 2 fold: 1.) Scientists know this and are aware of the caveats (as the article points out). 2.) It's likely that for many biochemical/physiological/medical questions the variation within a reasonably large sample of such a population (male/female, fit/non-fit, manual labor/office work, vegetarian/meat+potatoes, not to mention countless biochemical processes...) swamps out the variation among larger groups. How many studies fail even with such a homogeneous sample? Tons! My point is biology is messy enough already, that it's likely we've got bigger problems to solve than incorporating different standards of living, continents etc. Now it's true if you want to make broad claims about microbiota, by definition you have to actually sample much more widely than the WEIRDs. But again, if you want to make narrow claims about differences between healthy WEIRDs and non-healthy WEIRDs, maybe not. I'm sure it would help, but that doesn't mean those studies are useless! The technologies enabling this kind of work (chiefly next-gen high throughput DNA/RNA sequencing) are about 10 years old. And they haven't really been in relatively low barrier to entry use for much longer than 3 or 4. We're studying a hugely complex system here, and it's the definition of early days. Bias is important, the article is absolutely correct to point it out, but it's way too early to make any conclusions one way or the other about what is important in the microbiome, or the value of the research to date. The best we can say right now is, "It's probably very important, we don't know how just yet."
omonra 10y ago
I find it funny that some self-hating SJW came up with the acronym WEIRD to describe the population of the first world. Ie it's pretty clear they started out with the acronym and then searched for the letters to finish it off. Would this sht pass if someone wanted to come up with an acronym for the illiterate population of the world that subsist on less than $1 a day and ended up with UGLY (for the sake of example)? I find it equally unpleasant when people denigrate groups - whether they perceive them as 'underprivileged' or 'privileged'.
- tashi 10y ago
  1. Calling someone "weird" seems a lot more playful than insulting to me. 2. Do you find it equally unpleasant when people make insulting remarks about their own group than about a group they don't belong to? I think the latter is usually considered worse. 3. Speaking of which, "self-hating SJW" is a term used to denigrate a group--in this case, a group you don't belong to--and to dismiss them as people without considering the validity of their ideas. That's a cognitive shortcut that could be harmful.
  - omonra 10y ago
    Yes - it may be more 'playful' than insulting. But I definitely sense a general tone that it's ok to insult white / straight people while prostrating oneself in front of any kind of ethnic or sexual minority. This is a perfect example of this. Is there any purpose to calling members of the developed world 'weird'? To me it's pure propagation of 'victimhood' culture - where being not white or not straight gives one 'victim points'. I consider this racist and I'm calling it out.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological/indignant tangents. They lower the signal/noise ratio and usually provoke worse.

87 points by tokenadult 10y ago

Living in Southeast Asia, and countries like Nepal, that has taught me to honor my gut, and put inside of it only the things that it feels happy with, but needless to say, I still had to experience some of the worst shit-storms (literally) in my life, all because of mixing together bacteria from one food to the other -- I'm sure they could learn a lot from the Asian people. Experimenting with probiotics right now, and would love to hear about their effectiveness in a healthy diet.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kbutler 10y ago
Anecdote != data, but I spent two years in Thailand a couple of decades ago, and took acidophilus supplements regularly. I seemed to have less frequent intestinal illness than many friends, but I did have the occasional, umm, "issues".
tokenadult 10y ago
You've heard about the most shocking defecation story related to Nepal, haven't you? United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal are thought to have been so lax in digging latrines in their camps that they introduced cholera to Haiti when stationed there after the earthquake there. Until then, the island of Haiti had never had a reported case of cholera, but now cholera is endemic in Haiti. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14641343 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=211434286 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2114342... http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2016/04/what_caused_haiti_s_cholera_epidemic_the_cdc_s_museum_knows_but_won_t_say.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

jerf 10y ago

It could even be the case... and bear with me here because this is a shocking idea... it could even by the case that things that are not necessarily reasons to self-flaggelate are involved too. It surely could be that we don't exercise enough and we are all fat flabbly slobs who need to be beaten until we are good little boys and girls, but it could also be that we have legitimate genetic differences and for all we know our Western ancestors from a thousand years ago would also have had a quite different gut biome than the people isolated in Asia. It could be that we eat starchy processed crappy crap and should apologize repeatedly to ourselves until we stop whipping ourselves which we shouldn't ever do, but it could also be that even a healthy Western diet still involves substantially different fruits, vegetables, leafs, meats, etc. from other diets what with being over 10,000 miles away and in radically different ecosystems even when they were totally wild. Maybe if we want to do real science and not just find exactly and only what we were looking for, as we go into this new domain that is basically entirely unexplored, we should try to do so with open eyes instead of decades-old preconceptions. Or it could just be that we're bad, bad people and should feel bad. (Sorry. Well, sorry-ish. This unrelenting stream of "You Suck And Everything About You Is Wrong And We're Going To Mention It At Every Opportunity" in the news is really getting on my nerves after 30+ years of it.)

tacos 10y ago
Exactly. Am I really to believe that people walking around in the time of Jesus were dropping off perfect #3 and #4s on the Bristol Stool Scale on a precise 24 hour cycle? And all that's different now because we have machines that make corn more digestible versus hitting it with a rock like we used to do? The human body is a magnificent contraption and you should listen to yours -- and not pundits. But people who are trying to "become one with their gut" are likely making themselves sick in other ways. There's way, way too much obsessive behavior around our bodies and it's not helpful. Easy to sell stuff to, though.
vonmoltke 10y ago
> Or it could just be that we're bad, bad people and should feel bad. Why is there always a value judgment assumed? Why are you creating a false dichotomy between "it's out of my control" and "I'm a bad person"?

taeric 10y ago

This reads like an overly cynical view of early stage experimentation. Will there be a lot of data that has to be simplified and ignored? Of course. That is almost by definition why we look at Calories and other proxy measures. This will not become a science when someone perfects the one experiment that can answer questions. It becomes a science when people ask questions that they can falsify in ways that other people can replicate. It continues to be a science as long as that is the case. Edit: I should point out that I misread the headline. I thought it was "Is Gut Science Based?" Not "Biased." .... so, I definitely had a more slanted reading of the article as I was going.

bitwize 10y ago

An example of this in action: Japanese people have bacteria in their guts which aid in the breakdown of the cellulose-rich nori in their diet -- which probably at least partially explains why if you're a Westerner unacclimated to Japanese cuisine and you go to a sushi bar, you may end up with a case of the sushits. But this was only discovered recently -- like a few years ago -- it never occurring to people before then that gut microbiomes could be so diverse as to have developed local variants to handle local cuisine. But there you go.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

entee 10y ago

The idea that Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD as stated in the article) studies are biased is both obvious and not necessarily entirely problematic. The reasons it's not so bad are 2 fold: 1.) Scientists know this and are aware of the caveats (as the article points out). 2.) It's likely that for many biochemical/physiological/medical questions the variation within a reasonably large sample of such a population (male/female, fit/non-fit, manual labor/office work, vegetarian/meat+potatoes, not to mention countless biochemical processes...) swamps out the variation among larger groups. How many studies fail even with such a homogeneous sample? Tons! My point is biology is messy enough already, that it's likely we've got bigger problems to solve than incorporating different standards of living, continents etc. Now it's true if you want to make broad claims about microbiota, by definition you have to actually sample much more widely than the WEIRDs. But again, if you want to make narrow claims about differences between healthy WEIRDs and non-healthy WEIRDs, maybe not. I'm sure it would help, but that doesn't mean those studies are useless! The technologies enabling this kind of work (chiefly next-gen high throughput DNA/RNA sequencing) are about 10 years old. And they haven't really been in relatively low barrier to entry use for much longer than 3 or 4. We're studying a hugely complex system here, and it's the definition of early days. Bias is important, the article is absolutely correct to point it out, but it's way too early to make any conclusions one way or the other about what is important in the microbiome, or the value of the research to date. The best we can say right now is, "It's probably very important, we don't know how just yet."

omonra 10y ago

I find it funny that some self-hating SJW came up with the acronym WEIRD to describe the population of the first world. Ie it's pretty clear they started out with the acronym and then searched for the letters to finish it off. Would this sht pass if someone wanted to come up with an acronym for the illiterate population of the world that subsist on less than $1 a day and ended up with UGLY (for the sake of example)? I find it equally unpleasant when people denigrate groups - whether they perceive them as 'underprivileged' or 'privileged'.

tashi 10y ago
1. Calling someone "weird" seems a lot more playful than insulting to me. 2. Do you find it equally unpleasant when people make insulting remarks about their own group than about a group they don't belong to? I think the latter is usually considered worse. 3. Speaking of which, "self-hating SJW" is a term used to denigrate a group--in this case, a group you don't belong to--and to dismiss them as people without considering the validity of their ideas. That's a cognitive shortcut that could be harmful.
- omonra 10y ago
  Yes - it may be more 'playful' than insulting. But I definitely sense a general tone that it's ok to insult white / straight people while prostrating oneself in front of any kind of ethnic or sexual minority. This is a perfect example of this. Is there any purpose to calling members of the developed world 'weird'? To me it's pure propagation of 'victimhood' culture - where being not white or not straight gives one 'victim points'. I consider this racist and I'm calling it out.
dang 10y ago
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological/indignant tangents. They lower the signal/noise ratio and usually provoke worse.