4 ms·

You digest any DNA (and RNA) you eat. The pancreas creates nucleases specifically for this purpose. Why Pubmed even indexes this journal is beyond me.

by jryb 3y ago

orangepurple 3y ago
I should have posted his follow up study which demonstrates the transfer of genetic material from milk and its effects within human cells. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/CCID.S69135 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/CCID.S69135
- jryb 3y ago
  The claims here are just that microRNAs are delivered, not DNA, and that these change gene expression. Also, these Melnik papers are reviews, not studies - he's just summarizing other people's research (nothing wrong with that, in fact it's super useful, but Melnik isn't proving anything, and you should read the original papers and see if he's accurately reporting the results, and if those papers are designing their experiments correctly). Also consider that basically everything you eat contains miRNA. If it works for milk, it will work for everything else. But it probably won't, since none of this makes sense (since your digestive system has enzymes that will eliminate all of your dietary nucleic acids, and bile to disrupt any vesicles that contain miRNA) and also it seems like a lot of these claims that dietary miRNA can even make it into your bloodstream are unreproducible: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6628849/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6628849/ Can you honestly say to yourself you don't need this to be true? It certainly would be convenient if making one small dietary change could lead to huge health benefits.
  - orangepurple 3y ago
    Look at the large number of effects bovine milk exosomal micro RNAs have on mice. https://exrna.amegroups.com/article/view/68107/html https://exrna.amegroups.com/article/view/68107/html I know mice are not people but look at all the different tissues the miRNAs accumulate in mice. And there is some evidence that milk consumption turbocharges acne in humans which may be caused by more than the sugar content of it. There is no way this stuff is healthy just looking at its proliferative effects. It has a shotgun effect on so many proliferative pathways.
    - jryb 3y ago
      The effect of sugars certainly is plausible. I'm not saying milk is good or bad (I personally don't consume any animal products fwiw). I'm just saying that your fears about miRNA are completely unfounded. Look, I know you can't hear this, but these papers are really bad. They cite papers that have really poorly designed experiments that don't actually show what they claim to show. It's surprising, but you can publish papers that are obviously wrong. Here's a non-scientific analogy: say you're on a desert island, and there are a bunch of rabbits and one wolf (you can also see the whole island from wherever you stand - it's extremely small - so you know there's nothing else hiding anywhere). You immediately throw the wolf into a solar-powered wood chipper, and subsequently observe that the rabbits and healthy and happy. But then a year later all the rabbits are gone. You then tell me: "I know, the wolf must have eaten them!" Uh...no. They drowned and floated away, or dug burrows underground, or you ate them in a fever dream and forgot about it. But the wolf has been gone for a long time. Your digestive tract is basically the wood chipper. Exosomes are little droplets of oil that contain water and other water-soluble molecules on the inside. But bile (which your body produces) will dissolve them. Everything that's on the inside spills out and is digested further. RNA and DNA that might be inside exosomes also gets digested. You produce enzymes that chop them up into individual bases, so any information they contained is destroyed. A double wood chipper! So when I read these papers and they claim miRNAs in exosomes are flooding all over your body, I have to wonder how they measured that. And the answer is: never by sequencing, which would be definitive. They always use some method that is guaranteed to generate false positives, like just using a fat-soluble dye to label the exosomes. That dye is going to keep infiltrating the body long after the exosomes themselves have been digested. Or they just mix exosomes with cell cultures and pretend like that's meaningful. Again, I urge people to abandon any non-plant based foods, but these claims about miRNA are unscientific and contradict an enormous body of evidence.

You digest any DNA (and RNA) you eat. The pancreas creates nucleases specifically for this purpose. Why Pubmed even indexes this journal is beyond me.

by jryb 3y ago

You digest any DNA (and RNA) you eat. The pancreas creates nucleases specifically for this purpose. Why Pubmed even indexes this journal is beyond me.

orangepurple 3y ago

I should have posted his follow up study which demonstrates the transfer of genetic material from milk and its effects within human cells. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/CCID.S69135 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/CCID.S69135

jryb 3y ago
The claims here are just that microRNAs are delivered, not DNA, and that these change gene expression. Also, these Melnik papers are reviews, not studies - he's just summarizing other people's research (nothing wrong with that, in fact it's super useful, but Melnik isn't proving anything, and you should read the original papers and see if he's accurately reporting the results, and if those papers are designing their experiments correctly). Also consider that basically everything you eat contains miRNA. If it works for milk, it will work for everything else. But it probably won't, since none of this makes sense (since your digestive system has enzymes that will eliminate all of your dietary nucleic acids, and bile to disrupt any vesicles that contain miRNA) and also it seems like a lot of these claims that dietary miRNA can even make it into your bloodstream are unreproducible: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6628849/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6628849/ Can you honestly say to yourself you don't need this to be true? It certainly would be convenient if making one small dietary change could lead to huge health benefits.
- orangepurple 3y ago
  Look at the large number of effects bovine milk exosomal micro RNAs have on mice. https://exrna.amegroups.com/article/view/68107/html https://exrna.amegroups.com/article/view/68107/html I know mice are not people but look at all the different tissues the miRNAs accumulate in mice. And there is some evidence that milk consumption turbocharges acne in humans which may be caused by more than the sugar content of it. There is no way this stuff is healthy just looking at its proliferative effects. It has a shotgun effect on so many proliferative pathways.
  - jryb 3y ago
    The effect of sugars certainly is plausible. I'm not saying milk is good or bad (I personally don't consume any animal products fwiw). I'm just saying that your fears about miRNA are completely unfounded. Look, I know you can't hear this, but these papers are really bad. They cite papers that have really poorly designed experiments that don't actually show what they claim to show. It's surprising, but you can publish papers that are obviously wrong. Here's a non-scientific analogy: say you're on a desert island, and there are a bunch of rabbits and one wolf (you can also see the whole island from wherever you stand - it's extremely small - so you know there's nothing else hiding anywhere). You immediately throw the wolf into a solar-powered wood chipper, and subsequently observe that the rabbits and healthy and happy. But then a year later all the rabbits are gone. You then tell me: "I know, the wolf must have eaten them!" Uh...no. They drowned and floated away, or dug burrows underground, or you ate them in a fever dream and forgot about it. But the wolf has been gone for a long time. Your digestive tract is basically the wood chipper. Exosomes are little droplets of oil that contain water and other water-soluble molecules on the inside. But bile (which your body produces) will dissolve them. Everything that's on the inside spills out and is digested further. RNA and DNA that might be inside exosomes also gets digested. You produce enzymes that chop them up into individual bases, so any information they contained is destroyed. A double wood chipper! So when I read these papers and they claim miRNAs in exosomes are flooding all over your body, I have to wonder how they measured that. And the answer is: never by sequencing, which would be definitive. They always use some method that is guaranteed to generate false positives, like just using a fat-soluble dye to label the exosomes. That dye is going to keep infiltrating the body long after the exosomes themselves have been digested. Or they just mix exosomes with cell cultures and pretend like that's meaningful. Again, I urge people to abandon any non-plant based foods, but these claims about miRNA are unscientific and contradict an enormous body of evidence.