5 ms·

> How do you square this with the claim from the original article [...] I think the article makes some dubious claims, mostly centered around a single human vo

by Udo 14y ago

> How do you square this with the claim from the original article [...] I think the article makes some dubious claims, mostly centered around a single human volunteer (!), using a mice experiment to back that up - I'll remain skeptical until it can be reproduced by another team. The inclusion of Traditional Chinese Medicine alone as playing a key role to curing the condition is a huge tipoff that something is amiss. But even taking all those doubts into consideration, let's entertain the hypothesis that this bacterium does produce signals that make a person eat more. It's possible. But you still acquire the bacterium by eating too much in the first place. It simply couldn't colonize you if you didn't. > Why, then, do some people become obese when they eat as their instincts tell them, and others do not? My personal opinion is there are two big factors. First, lifestyle. People eat too much because that's simply how they live their lives. It may be because they only have access to high-calorie food, or because everybody around them eats too much, or because they have made a habit of eating too much. The second group (which I'm a part of) is worse: for them, food is an addiction. Many of them may already eat "healthy", high-quality stuff - so moving away from fast food does nothing for them. Eating simply has the same effect on them as drugs do on other people.

Mz 14y ago
You do not acquire bacterium by eating too much. You acquire them by being exposed to them -- kissing the wrong person, sitting beneath a contaminated window air conditioner blowing on you, etc. Yes, they then need to colonize you to become a big problem. You have zero evidence to support your claim that eating too much is a prerequisite for their ability to colonize you.
- Udo 14y ago
  I already outlined the mechanism in my first post. Kissing and ACs are not the reason you get these organisms inside you. They are already everywhere. Just by moving through life, you're exposed to a huge variety of enterobacteriae. You wouldn't believe how everything is just covered with E. coli, for example. It's not a matter of staying away from dirty surfaces, or of wiping everything down with disinfectant. These organisms are omnipresent, and it's normal for them to live inside your gut as well. In fact, the majority of them are endosymbionts, and are regulated by their environment. This means whatever comes into your colon determines which bacteria get to thrive on it. This is not my claim, it's basic biology. I invite you to do the following experiment at home. Get yourself a petri dish and fill it with sterile Agar. Then wash your hands. After that, make some fingerprints in the Agar. Incubate for a few days. You'll be surprised.
  - Mz 14y ago
    Oh, I am very well aware that germs, fungus etc are rampant. But you have to be exposed to a specific one to catch that specific one. There has to be a vector, whether it is a dirty surface or another person or something else. Your view amounts to "vague miasma -- no specific source", which is a view that annoys me. It came from somewhere. It didn't just magically pop into existence from the ether because "you ate too much". I really don't know how to discuss this with you. You blame everything on "behavior" then claim to have a food addiction. Your view strikes me as rather handwavy, while dismissing a possible specific cause for some individuals: exposure to a pathogen. This is not the first time I have heard this, so I doubt that there is only one study. No, I likely cannot convince you of anything. But you are equally failing to convince me.
    - Udo 14y ago
      First, let's do away with the hostility. I don't know what I have done to provoke it but it's certainly not worth discussing anything in this manner. It's important not to engage in willful misunderstanding, or conflate separate points I made into some kind of chimera to distort what I said. > You blame everything on "behavior" then claim to have a food addiction. This is certainly a gross mischaracterization, and I can only assume you're using it to aggravate me somehow? I invite you to read again what I actually wrote regarding this and several other different issues. I'm not sure if you're just trying to troll me or if you actually want to have a discussion, but I'll just assume you're not trying to behave like an asshole on purpose and move on. You misunderstood my point about how gut bacteria take hold in the first place. Mostly, enterobacter strains are something which lives inside people's guts anyway. There are several pathogenic strains but this is not what the article is talking about. We're talking about an organism that lives off what you feed it. There is nothing hand-wavy about that. It's just a fact. Just as food intake determines individual weight-gain, the availability of nutrients in combination with its environment determines the amount present of a given gut bacterium. It's also a fact that our daily environment is rich in gut (and other) bacteria. > It didn't just magically pop into existence from the ether because "you ate too much". I failed to explain this properly then. People have a certain mixture of different gut bacteria inside them, they also tend to acquire them in the "hand-wavy" manner described above. Now, a bacterium needs to eat in order to survive and reproduce. Different bacteria are optimized to eat different things in different environmental conditions. If E.c. colony size is indeed statistically larger in obese people (a point that still needs to be shown conclusively), the reason for that will be that they get a lot of nutrients under favorable conditions. There is nothing magical about it, just basic biology. > No, I likely cannot convince you of anything. But you are equally failing to convince me. It depends where you're coming from. I'm not even sure we're speaking the same language, otherwise I can't explain how some of my points could have come across in such a distorted fashion (even taking into account my infamous inability to communicate). In some sentences you portray my views as exactly the opposite of what I actually said. I really mean it when I say I'm sorry we're at this point, but I'm also unsure what I could have done better. Also, a meta point: have we done this before? I'm not sure.

by Udo 14y ago

Mz 14y ago

You do not acquire bacterium by eating too much. You acquire them by being exposed to them -- kissing the wrong person, sitting beneath a contaminated window air conditioner blowing on you, etc. Yes, they then need to colonize you to become a big problem. You have zero evidence to support your claim that eating too much is a prerequisite for their ability to colonize you.

Udo 14y ago
I already outlined the mechanism in my first post. Kissing and ACs are not the reason you get these organisms inside you. They are already everywhere. Just by moving through life, you're exposed to a huge variety of enterobacteriae. You wouldn't believe how everything is just covered with E. coli, for example. It's not a matter of staying away from dirty surfaces, or of wiping everything down with disinfectant. These organisms are omnipresent, and it's normal for them to live inside your gut as well. In fact, the majority of them are endosymbionts, and are regulated by their environment. This means whatever comes into your colon determines which bacteria get to thrive on it. This is not my claim, it's basic biology. I invite you to do the following experiment at home. Get yourself a petri dish and fill it with sterile Agar. Then wash your hands. After that, make some fingerprints in the Agar. Incubate for a few days. You'll be surprised.
- Mz 14y ago
  Oh, I am very well aware that germs, fungus etc are rampant. But you have to be exposed to a specific one to catch that specific one. There has to be a vector, whether it is a dirty surface or another person or something else. Your view amounts to "vague miasma -- no specific source", which is a view that annoys me. It came from somewhere. It didn't just magically pop into existence from the ether because "you ate too much". I really don't know how to discuss this with you. You blame everything on "behavior" then claim to have a food addiction. Your view strikes me as rather handwavy, while dismissing a possible specific cause for some individuals: exposure to a pathogen. This is not the first time I have heard this, so I doubt that there is only one study. No, I likely cannot convince you of anything. But you are equally failing to convince me.
  - Udo 14y ago
    First, let's do away with the hostility. I don't know what I have done to provoke it but it's certainly not worth discussing anything in this manner. It's important not to engage in willful misunderstanding, or conflate separate points I made into some kind of chimera to distort what I said. > You blame everything on "behavior" then claim to have a food addiction. This is certainly a gross mischaracterization, and I can only assume you're using it to aggravate me somehow? I invite you to read again what I actually wrote regarding this and several other different issues. I'm not sure if you're just trying to troll me or if you actually want to have a discussion, but I'll just assume you're not trying to behave like an asshole on purpose and move on. You misunderstood my point about how gut bacteria take hold in the first place. Mostly, enterobacter strains are something which lives inside people's guts anyway. There are several pathogenic strains but this is not what the article is talking about. We're talking about an organism that lives off what you feed it. There is nothing hand-wavy about that. It's just a fact. Just as food intake determines individual weight-gain, the availability of nutrients in combination with its environment determines the amount present of a given gut bacterium. It's also a fact that our daily environment is rich in gut (and other) bacteria. > It didn't just magically pop into existence from the ether because "you ate too much". I failed to explain this properly then. People have a certain mixture of different gut bacteria inside them, they also tend to acquire them in the "hand-wavy" manner described above. Now, a bacterium needs to eat in order to survive and reproduce. Different bacteria are optimized to eat different things in different environmental conditions. If E.c. colony size is indeed statistically larger in obese people (a point that still needs to be shown conclusively), the reason for that will be that they get a lot of nutrients under favorable conditions. There is nothing magical about it, just basic biology. > No, I likely cannot convince you of anything. But you are equally failing to convince me. It depends where you're coming from. I'm not even sure we're speaking the same language, otherwise I can't explain how some of my points could have come across in such a distorted fashion (even taking into account my infamous inability to communicate). In some sentences you portray my views as exactly the opposite of what I actually said. I really mean it when I say I'm sorry we're at this point, but I'm also unsure what I could have done better. Also, a meta point: have we done this before? I'm not sure.