7 ms·

This article is mostly cliche popsci trash that isn’t worth reading. Good for a game of logical fallacy bingo. The only interesting development seems to be th

by mulmen 4y ago

This article is mostly cliche popsci trash that isn’t worth reading. Good for a game of logical fallacy bingo. The only interesting development seems to be the methodology but that only gets a passing mention. The rest is basically fearmongering. > In humans, for example, gut bacteria influence how the immune system responds to pathogens and allergens, or interact with the brain, affecting mood. Ok. But what does that have to do with diversity? Humans have not been an emotionally rational species at any point in the past. Arguably the relationship between gut biome diversity and civilization is inverse. Maybe we want fewer microbes. Lifespan has also increased with decreased gut biome diversity. This is why correlation alone is uninteresting. You can find it anywhere. > Splitting the difference, people in less developed parts of the world have between 60 and 65 of those bacterial groups, an observation that ties the decrease in microbial diversity to urbanization. Oh come on. How does a line like this get published? This is fine if you define “ties” as “moves with” but not “is connected to”. IOW correlation doesn’t imply causation. > Kyle Meyer, a microbiologist at UC Berkeley, argues such losses are not necessarily a problem. “Maybe we don’t need them,” he points out. But Moeller is worried. “We are really doing some scary stuff to our microbiomes,” he warns. Why is it “scary”? Nothing in this article established any cause for concern. The guy that developed the methodology is now in search of a problem his solution fits.

pojzon 4y ago
Whats scary is that we have more and more civilization diseases and we have no idea whats causing them beside guesses. Worsening of the environment we live in impacts us in ways we cannot even imagine. Scary is that we cannot go back, coz its financially impossible for most.
- majormajor 4y ago
  Cities were historically unhealthy, etc, etc, as well. Yet people kept moving to them. So "most people can't afford to [leave civiliation]" is far from new. Perhaps the life everyone has been fleeing to get to cities was never what you think it is for most.
  - ramblenode 4y ago
    The movement to cities was more likely the result of an arms race rather than preference. Most anthropological evidence points to deterioration in quality of life (e.g. diet, height, disease, teeth, inequality) when comparing hunter-gatherers and city dwellers. Larger populations, specialization of labor, and fortifications made city-states militarily superior to small bands of hunter-gatherers and allowed cities to dominate a surrounding region (at least until the modern horse). When a region was depleted of wild game then cities and their croplands were the most reliable source of food. Armies from city states would not infrequently raid and capture smaller groups of humans and bring them back to cities as slaves. So cities were likely a forced choice, as smaller nomadic groups were forceably absorbed into the domains of city-states or repelled toward less hospitable lands.
  - watwut 4y ago
    People moved to cities for economic opportunities.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      "People moved to cities for economic opportunities" and "people can't financially afford to leave the cities" seem like just the glass half full / glass half empty versions of the same thing. Put it one way it's bad, put it one way its good. It's a choice with tradeoffs - I'm just pointing out that those tradeoffs aren't some uniquely new "collapse of our society" thing.
      - mulmen 4y ago
        This is an interesting revelation. Thanks for framing it this way. Riffing: I think there’s a middle phrasing similar to “cities are the most efficient allocation of resources we have yet invented.” Similar to the “democracy is the least bad system of government yet invented.” There’s some corollary to survivorship bias at play here as well. Cities are an apparently natural consequence of human civilization so we know a lot about their flaws. But civilizations that didn’t migrate toward cities either failed or records of their existence was lost.
- nextos 4y ago
  > Whats scary is that we have more and more civilization diseases and we have no idea whats causing them beside guesses. We do have some good mechanistic hypotheses, but most reviews fail to describe them because a lot of research is hand wavy. However, things are slowly reaching mainstream. Let's consider type 1 diabetes (T1D), which is a common autoimmune disorder where beta cells in the pancreas get destroyed by your own immune system. T1D was rare a century ago, and we know from patient records that incidence increases rapidly whenever a society becomes industrialized. For example, take the Karelia region split between Finland and Russia. People on both sides of the border have the same genetic background. However, children on the Finish side have 10x more incidence of insulin autoantibodies [1]. Microbiomes on both sides are actually very different, with Russian children resembling ancient non-industrialized ones. The immune system is essentially a huge distributed memory where individual cells recognize small protein or lipid fragments as self or foreign, and then collectively decide whether there is an infection in the particular microenvironment they are exploring. We know T1D typically begins because the immune system recognizes a particular insulin chunk, the amino acid sequence SHLVEALYLVCGERGFF, as foreign. In other more complex autoimmune disorders this part is less clear. It turns out that many gut bacteria mimic that particular insulin chunk [2]. That probably gives these commensal bacteria the ability to survive and avoid immune responses, and it is a flag of the symbiotic relationship these bacteria have developed with higher organisms in the last 100 million years. Now, the bacterial ecosystem of a modern gut has a lot less diversity than it should and therefore it is very fragile. We don't know exactly what happens before T1D, but one possibility is that these bacteria grow too much in abundance and therefore initiate autoimmunity as T cells found in the pancreas of T1D patients can't distinguish between one protein chunk from these bacteria and insulin. There are similar patterns in other autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis. This patent aims to edit bacterial mimics that cause autoimmunity using a CRISPR system in a pill [3]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4950857/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4950857/ (Figure 1) [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.11.22274678v1.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.11.22274678v... (Extended Table 1) [3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US11224621B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US11224621B2/en (see e.g. Example 4)
  - manmal 4y ago
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Which "civilization diseases"?
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    Diseases of civilization usually refers to things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer. I'm not 100% sure but I think the common threads are metabolic and inflammatory.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      cancer has nothing to do with civilisation. it was already recorded way before we had modern and industrial societies
      - wutbrodo 4y ago
        > it was already recorded way before we had modern and industrial societies This doesn't falsify the claim at all. Diabetes was first recorded 3500 years ago, and none of the other diseases on the list were literally invented by industrialization. Diseases of civilization refers (essentially) to diseases whose casualty rates dominate in societies of abundance and industrialization, by contrast to the predominance of (eg) infectious diseases in pre-industrial societies. I do agree that it stands slightly apart from the rest of the examples, in that (eg) a contemporary hunter-gatherer still has a fair chance of getting cancer while they have a very low chance of diabetes/obesity. But it's pedantry to claim flatly that it doesn't qualify, especially given plenty of scientific usage[1][2][3] that contradicts the claim. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362881/#:~:text=Large%20amounts%20of%20scientific%20evidence,disscussed%20further%20in%20this%20paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362881/#:~:tex.... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00933491 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00933491 [3] https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/323926 https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/323926
insaider 4y ago
Sounds like you're fighting confirmation bias with confirmation bias. Your points are valid, don't get me wrong, but there is also a lot of research causally linking microbiome deficiencies with various health problems. Also worth noting your shots seem more aimed at the journalist's style than the researcher's work. I for one, think this is super valuable and promising research
- mulmen 4y ago
  > Your points are valid, don't get me wrong, but there is also a lot of research causally linking microbiome deficiencies with various health problems. I’m sure there is. But it isn’t in this article. So reading this to learn about it is a waste of time. > Also worth noting your shots seem more aimed at the journalist's style than the researcher's work. That’s a correct assessment, yes. > I for one, think this is super valuable and promising research A good source for that conclusion may exist, but this isn’t it.
jasonfarnon 4y ago
Why is it “scary”? Nothing in this article established any cause for concern. I think when people see a difference in modern life versus traditional, and that difference was unexpected and unintended, that in itself is cause for concern. I don't need to believe claims about how important the gut biome is to the brain etc. But I would be surprised if the there weren't some consequence of the difference, and it seems like wishful thinking to suppose, as you do, that the consequences are benign.
- mulmen 4y ago
  You answered the wrong question. The article reproduced a claim without substantiation. I didn’t conclude that the effects are benign. I claimed that this article does nothing to assist me in deciding if they are.
  - lwouis 4y ago
    Not knowing which way the scale tips is in-itself scary, I think. It means moving into uncharted territory. Similarly, global warning is rising temperature, and we are trying hard to model the effects, but it's really all it is: models and guesses. We would much prefer if we could go back to the climate we were familiar with for the past 20,000 years. That one we were starting to understand to some extent. Now all bets are off
  - watwut 4y ago
    Why should article assist you in deciding of they are? That decision is not science. That decision is politics.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      The article should contribute something other than being a glorified bulleted list. Why bother writing anything if in the end there is no substance?
- neuroma 4y ago
  I think OP was rather bemoaning the lack of useful information and scientific rigor. Their points were good I thought. Whilst microbiome is a fascinating topic people are quick to lend unsubstantiated pet theories new credence, harboured by the topics nasence and complexity. Anecdotally, logical fallacy bingo is a great actual game and I recommend everyone play
metamuas 4y ago
jcoq 4y ago
I think you're largely missing the point of this article, which mostly summarizes a novel technique for comparing gut biome diversity, and which goes through a small amount of effort to summarize the growing (if not clearly established) scientific consensus about the importance of healthy gut biomes. I don't think it takes very much imagination to understand why the loss of diversity in an ecosystem might have negative implications for that ecosystem. For whatever it's worth to you, Science magazine is a companion to the extremely prestigious Science Journal and it often tries to summarize the research in the journal. The tiniest amount of searching shows that the biologist whose work is being summarized a is one of the leading experts in this area.
- mulmen 4y ago
  > I think you're largely missing the point of this article, which mostly summarizes a novel technique for comparing gut biome diversity As I already said, it doesn’t largely do that. It mentions it in literally one paragraph that is itself mostly fluff. The most substantive line is literally “with computers”: > With computers, they were able to compile the fragments of DNA sequenced into whole genomes of the gut microbes present. There’s no further mention of how these computers work or what they do or what is novel about them. And that’s the most interesting part of the piece.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Most of article is tldr of various researches with links if you are interested in how they collected poop to make tests or used computers.
ekianjo 4y ago
> Lifespan has also increased with decreased gut biome diversity. Life expectancy increase is mostly a factor of decreased death at birth or in early years. You dont see an exponential increase of 100 years old. People die at about the same age as before, give or take.
- eru 4y ago
  Maximum ages haven't really increased much, yes; but life expectancy at eg age 10 has increased a lot, too, throughout history to modern times.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    Any source for this?
- sleepychu 4y ago
  Parent's point is that you can draw a correlation to a beneficial factor without examination of whether causation exists just as easily. You correctly identify that it is unlikely your lifespan is increasing because the average gut bacteria diversity is decreasing, more likely they are simple correlated.
- watwut 4y ago
  This is not true. An average adult lives longer still just not by that much. Whole bunch of deadly diseases or injuries are not deadly anymore. The work got safer and injuries happen significantly less often. What did not changed is maximum longevity people have assuming they don't get sick or injured.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > The work got safer and injuries happen significantly less often. For this kind of statement about lifespan i assume that we remove all accidental deaths since they are just causing noise versus the actual lifespan
    - 4y ago
sol_invictus 4y ago
Lifespan is a poor metric for quality of life. You can be alive whilst being plagued by multiple illness. Healthspan is what is important (how long you can live without suffering from a major ailment) and that is where gut microbiome plays an important role.
- mulmen 4y ago
  No shit. That’s the point. I can draw a correlation between basically anything. That doesn’t make it interesting.
potamic 4y ago
It is scary because the gut microbiome in humans is evolving much faster in recent times. This is coming from a study that maps evolution of gut microbiome in primates to the primate evolutionary tree. They found that families of gut bacteria can be passed down over millions of years in a species. The gut microbiome has always coevolved with the species. As the species diverges, so does the microbiome adapting to the changes in the host. Except in modern humans, where it is evolving at a much faster rate since industrialization. It's a very interesting observation in my opinion and asks important questions about how the modern lifestyle is affecting the biome. For instance, what happens if a pregnant mother takes antibiotics? Will a family of bacteria get killed off in that mother's evolutionary branch? The article is most certainly popsci and written for laymen, but I don't think it is trash at all. Not sure why you think so. It highlights some very interesting discoveries and offers you a window to dive in and learn more things on the subject if you are interested.
- mulmen 4y ago
  Consider my comment as feedback from an editor to the author. I don’t think this is fit to print. I agree with you. This could be an interesting topic. But the article provides no substantive information. Anything that is learned will be in spite of this article, not because of it. What you describe is the potential that I maintain this article fails to live up to. > It's a very interesting observation in my opinion and asks important questions about how the modern lifestyle is affecting the biome. For instance, what happens if a pregnant mother takes antibiotics? Will a family of bacteria get killed off in that mother's evolutionary branch? That’s a great question! But it isn’t in the article.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Agamus 4y ago
    I'm not trying to be snarky, and while I largely agree with you, I feel like I'm missing something. Are you saying that the only time that it is 'fit to print' something about this topic is when we have arrived at the conclusion, and are ready to present objective facts? Or, perhaps we shouldn't print speculation about interesting topics unless we have the answers to the questions being discussed? Or, print should be reserved objective facts? I agree that hyperbole like "scary" are confusing to many people. But in this case, I think the scientist is appealing to slang in an effort to communicate with non-scientists.
socialdemocrat 4y ago
I found it interesting and useful. Much more so than this criticism which comes across as overly pedantic. It quotes various researches. It isn’t meant to be a study or paper onto itself. Anyone interested in the scientific details would lookup the publications from the people mentioned. Articles like this is to give you an overview and spark some interest among the general public.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
All good points. But it's scary because without gut bacteria we'd all be dead. We depend on them so much that I sometimes wonder if they're the host and we're the "parasite". What you said about correlation v cause and such is spot on. And perhaps the article fails because of what you listed. Nonetheless, losing half of something that our living depends doesn't feel like grounds for celebration. The fact that we just don't know, well that's concerning as well.
feet 4y ago
Having a community of different species is good. The way that those communities work is that they keep each other's populations in check. If we go out of balance and one dominates we can see disease states coming from not only an imbalance of metabolic products but even infection from the population that went out of control.
watwut 4y ago
I think that your comment is excessively uncharitable bordering on a lie. The article does not make reader scared at all. It does not call for any major action. It is about what kind of research that is being done and tl;dr to what they found. And then quotes from researchers most of them about "that research is really cool". It is popularization article with excessively low amount of anything emotional. It is interesting article too. But you somehow want to to be scary and then blame it for not being sufficiently scary while blaming it for being scary.

by mulmen 4y ago

pojzon 4y ago

Whats scary is that we have more and more civilization diseases and we have no idea whats causing them beside guesses. Worsening of the environment we live in impacts us in ways we cannot even imagine. Scary is that we cannot go back, coz its financially impossible for most.

majormajor 4y ago
Cities were historically unhealthy, etc, etc, as well. Yet people kept moving to them. So "most people can't afford to [leave civiliation]" is far from new. Perhaps the life everyone has been fleeing to get to cities was never what you think it is for most.
- ramblenode 4y ago
  The movement to cities was more likely the result of an arms race rather than preference. Most anthropological evidence points to deterioration in quality of life (e.g. diet, height, disease, teeth, inequality) when comparing hunter-gatherers and city dwellers. Larger populations, specialization of labor, and fortifications made city-states militarily superior to small bands of hunter-gatherers and allowed cities to dominate a surrounding region (at least until the modern horse). When a region was depleted of wild game then cities and their croplands were the most reliable source of food. Armies from city states would not infrequently raid and capture smaller groups of humans and bring them back to cities as slaves. So cities were likely a forced choice, as smaller nomadic groups were forceably absorbed into the domains of city-states or repelled toward less hospitable lands.
- watwut 4y ago
  People moved to cities for economic opportunities.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    "People moved to cities for economic opportunities" and "people can't financially afford to leave the cities" seem like just the glass half full / glass half empty versions of the same thing. Put it one way it's bad, put it one way its good. It's a choice with tradeoffs - I'm just pointing out that those tradeoffs aren't some uniquely new "collapse of our society" thing.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      This is an interesting revelation. Thanks for framing it this way. Riffing: I think there’s a middle phrasing similar to “cities are the most efficient allocation of resources we have yet invented.” Similar to the “democracy is the least bad system of government yet invented.” There’s some corollary to survivorship bias at play here as well. Cities are an apparently natural consequence of human civilization so we know a lot about their flaws. But civilizations that didn’t migrate toward cities either failed or records of their existence was lost.
nextos 4y ago
> Whats scary is that we have more and more civilization diseases and we have no idea whats causing them beside guesses. We do have some good mechanistic hypotheses, but most reviews fail to describe them because a lot of research is hand wavy. However, things are slowly reaching mainstream. Let's consider type 1 diabetes (T1D), which is a common autoimmune disorder where beta cells in the pancreas get destroyed by your own immune system. T1D was rare a century ago, and we know from patient records that incidence increases rapidly whenever a society becomes industrialized. For example, take the Karelia region split between Finland and Russia. People on both sides of the border have the same genetic background. However, children on the Finish side have 10x more incidence of insulin autoantibodies [1]. Microbiomes on both sides are actually very different, with Russian children resembling ancient non-industrialized ones. The immune system is essentially a huge distributed memory where individual cells recognize small protein or lipid fragments as self or foreign, and then collectively decide whether there is an infection in the particular microenvironment they are exploring. We know T1D typically begins because the immune system recognizes a particular insulin chunk, the amino acid sequence SHLVEALYLVCGERGFF, as foreign. In other more complex autoimmune disorders this part is less clear. It turns out that many gut bacteria mimic that particular insulin chunk [2]. That probably gives these commensal bacteria the ability to survive and avoid immune responses, and it is a flag of the symbiotic relationship these bacteria have developed with higher organisms in the last 100 million years. Now, the bacterial ecosystem of a modern gut has a lot less diversity than it should and therefore it is very fragile. We don't know exactly what happens before T1D, but one possibility is that these bacteria grow too much in abundance and therefore initiate autoimmunity as T cells found in the pancreas of T1D patients can't distinguish between one protein chunk from these bacteria and insulin. There are similar patterns in other autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis. This patent aims to edit bacterial mimics that cause autoimmunity using a CRISPR system in a pill [3]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4950857/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4950857/ (Figure 1) [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.11.22274678v1.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.11.22274678v... (Extended Table 1) [3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US11224621B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US11224621B2/en (see e.g. Example 4)
- manmal 4y ago
ekianjo 4y ago
Which "civilization diseases"?
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  Diseases of civilization usually refers to things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer. I'm not 100% sure but I think the common threads are metabolic and inflammatory.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    cancer has nothing to do with civilisation. it was already recorded way before we had modern and industrial societies
    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      > it was already recorded way before we had modern and industrial societies This doesn't falsify the claim at all. Diabetes was first recorded 3500 years ago, and none of the other diseases on the list were literally invented by industrialization. Diseases of civilization refers (essentially) to diseases whose casualty rates dominate in societies of abundance and industrialization, by contrast to the predominance of (eg) infectious diseases in pre-industrial societies. I do agree that it stands slightly apart from the rest of the examples, in that (eg) a contemporary hunter-gatherer still has a fair chance of getting cancer while they have a very low chance of diabetes/obesity. But it's pedantry to claim flatly that it doesn't qualify, especially given plenty of scientific usage[1][2][3] that contradicts the claim. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362881/#:~:text=Large%20amounts%20of%20scientific%20evidence,disscussed%20further%20in%20this%20paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362881/#:~:tex.... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00933491 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00933491 [3] https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/323926 https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/323926

insaider 4y ago

Sounds like you're fighting confirmation bias with confirmation bias. Your points are valid, don't get me wrong, but there is also a lot of research causally linking microbiome deficiencies with various health problems. Also worth noting your shots seem more aimed at the journalist's style than the researcher's work. I for one, think this is super valuable and promising research

mulmen 4y ago
> Your points are valid, don't get me wrong, but there is also a lot of research causally linking microbiome deficiencies with various health problems. I’m sure there is. But it isn’t in this article. So reading this to learn about it is a waste of time. > Also worth noting your shots seem more aimed at the journalist's style than the researcher's work. That’s a correct assessment, yes. > I for one, think this is super valuable and promising research A good source for that conclusion may exist, but this isn’t it.

jasonfarnon 4y ago

Why is it “scary”? Nothing in this article established any cause for concern. I think when people see a difference in modern life versus traditional, and that difference was unexpected and unintended, that in itself is cause for concern. I don't need to believe claims about how important the gut biome is to the brain etc. But I would be surprised if the there weren't some consequence of the difference, and it seems like wishful thinking to suppose, as you do, that the consequences are benign.

mulmen 4y ago
You answered the wrong question. The article reproduced a claim without substantiation. I didn’t conclude that the effects are benign. I claimed that this article does nothing to assist me in deciding if they are.
- lwouis 4y ago
  Not knowing which way the scale tips is in-itself scary, I think. It means moving into uncharted territory. Similarly, global warning is rising temperature, and we are trying hard to model the effects, but it's really all it is: models and guesses. We would much prefer if we could go back to the climate we were familiar with for the past 20,000 years. That one we were starting to understand to some extent. Now all bets are off
- watwut 4y ago
  Why should article assist you in deciding of they are? That decision is not science. That decision is politics.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    The article should contribute something other than being a glorified bulleted list. Why bother writing anything if in the end there is no substance?
neuroma 4y ago
I think OP was rather bemoaning the lack of useful information and scientific rigor. Their points were good I thought. Whilst microbiome is a fascinating topic people are quick to lend unsubstantiated pet theories new credence, harboured by the topics nasence and complexity. Anecdotally, logical fallacy bingo is a great actual game and I recommend everyone play

metamuas 4y ago

jcoq 4y ago

I think you're largely missing the point of this article, which mostly summarizes a novel technique for comparing gut biome diversity, and which goes through a small amount of effort to summarize the growing (if not clearly established) scientific consensus about the importance of healthy gut biomes. I don't think it takes very much imagination to understand why the loss of diversity in an ecosystem might have negative implications for that ecosystem. For whatever it's worth to you, Science magazine is a companion to the extremely prestigious Science Journal and it often tries to summarize the research in the journal. The tiniest amount of searching shows that the biologist whose work is being summarized a is one of the leading experts in this area.

mulmen 4y ago
> I think you're largely missing the point of this article, which mostly summarizes a novel technique for comparing gut biome diversity As I already said, it doesn’t largely do that. It mentions it in literally one paragraph that is itself mostly fluff. The most substantive line is literally “with computers”: > With computers, they were able to compile the fragments of DNA sequenced into whole genomes of the gut microbes present. There’s no further mention of how these computers work or what they do or what is novel about them. And that’s the most interesting part of the piece.
- watwut 4y ago
  Most of article is tldr of various researches with links if you are interested in how they collected poop to make tests or used computers.

ekianjo 4y ago

> Lifespan has also increased with decreased gut biome diversity. Life expectancy increase is mostly a factor of decreased death at birth or in early years. You dont see an exponential increase of 100 years old. People die at about the same age as before, give or take.

eru 4y ago
Maximum ages haven't really increased much, yes; but life expectancy at eg age 10 has increased a lot, too, throughout history to modern times.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Any source for this?
sleepychu 4y ago
Parent's point is that you can draw a correlation to a beneficial factor without examination of whether causation exists just as easily. You correctly identify that it is unlikely your lifespan is increasing because the average gut bacteria diversity is decreasing, more likely they are simple correlated.
watwut 4y ago
This is not true. An average adult lives longer still just not by that much. Whole bunch of deadly diseases or injuries are not deadly anymore. The work got safer and injuries happen significantly less often. What did not changed is maximum longevity people have assuming they don't get sick or injured.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > The work got safer and injuries happen significantly less often. For this kind of statement about lifespan i assume that we remove all accidental deaths since they are just causing noise versus the actual lifespan
  - 4y ago

sol_invictus 4y ago

Lifespan is a poor metric for quality of life. You can be alive whilst being plagued by multiple illness. Healthspan is what is important (how long you can live without suffering from a major ailment) and that is where gut microbiome plays an important role.

mulmen 4y ago
No shit. That’s the point. I can draw a correlation between basically anything. That doesn’t make it interesting.

potamic 4y ago

It is scary because the gut microbiome in humans is evolving much faster in recent times. This is coming from a study that maps evolution of gut microbiome in primates to the primate evolutionary tree. They found that families of gut bacteria can be passed down over millions of years in a species. The gut microbiome has always coevolved with the species. As the species diverges, so does the microbiome adapting to the changes in the host. Except in modern humans, where it is evolving at a much faster rate since industrialization. It's a very interesting observation in my opinion and asks important questions about how the modern lifestyle is affecting the biome. For instance, what happens if a pregnant mother takes antibiotics? Will a family of bacteria get killed off in that mother's evolutionary branch? The article is most certainly popsci and written for laymen, but I don't think it is trash at all. Not sure why you think so. It highlights some very interesting discoveries and offers you a window to dive in and learn more things on the subject if you are interested.

mulmen 4y ago
Consider my comment as feedback from an editor to the author. I don’t think this is fit to print. I agree with you. This could be an interesting topic. But the article provides no substantive information. Anything that is learned will be in spite of this article, not because of it. What you describe is the potential that I maintain this article fails to live up to. > It's a very interesting observation in my opinion and asks important questions about how the modern lifestyle is affecting the biome. For instance, what happens if a pregnant mother takes antibiotics? Will a family of bacteria get killed off in that mother's evolutionary branch? That’s a great question! But it isn’t in the article.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Agamus 4y ago
  I'm not trying to be snarky, and while I largely agree with you, I feel like I'm missing something. Are you saying that the only time that it is 'fit to print' something about this topic is when we have arrived at the conclusion, and are ready to present objective facts? Or, perhaps we shouldn't print speculation about interesting topics unless we have the answers to the questions being discussed? Or, print should be reserved objective facts? I agree that hyperbole like "scary" are confusing to many people. But in this case, I think the scientist is appealing to slang in an effort to communicate with non-scientists.

socialdemocrat 4y ago

I found it interesting and useful. Much more so than this criticism which comes across as overly pedantic. It quotes various researches. It isn’t meant to be a study or paper onto itself. Anyone interested in the scientific details would lookup the publications from the people mentioned. Articles like this is to give you an overview and spark some interest among the general public.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

All good points. But it's scary because without gut bacteria we'd all be dead. We depend on them so much that I sometimes wonder if they're the host and we're the "parasite". What you said about correlation v cause and such is spot on. And perhaps the article fails because of what you listed. Nonetheless, losing half of something that our living depends doesn't feel like grounds for celebration. The fact that we just don't know, well that's concerning as well.

feet 4y ago

Having a community of different species is good. The way that those communities work is that they keep each other's populations in check. If we go out of balance and one dominates we can see disease states coming from not only an imbalance of metabolic products but even infection from the population that went out of control.

watwut 4y ago

I think that your comment is excessively uncharitable bordering on a lie. The article does not make reader scared at all. It does not call for any major action. It is about what kind of research that is being done and tl;dr to what they found. And then quotes from researchers most of them about "that research is really cool". It is popularization article with excessively low amount of anything emotional. It is interesting article too. But you somehow want to to be scary and then blame it for not being sufficiently scary while blaming it for being scary.