3 ms·

"we do know enough to say that the modern default is bad." Could you articulate why this statement is even plausible?

• dlss 12y ago
  Interesting. To be clear, the current state of affairs is eating sterilized food (often required by law to control pathogens), and taking antibiotics every 2 years[1]. This is bad a priori, since it's two deviations from the only known good condition -- the one we evolved in. But I take it that argument was non-persuasive. So here are some other people discussing the idea: The hygiene hypothesis[2] is broadly the theory that diseases of affluence[3] are related to living in overly sterilized conditions. Most if not all of the items discussed in [3] are correlated with your microbiome[4], with large studies underway to determine the role in more detail [5]. Okay, hope this helps. To answer your question a third way: most biologists working on the microbiome think it's plausible. [1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1212055 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1212055 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence [4] http://academy.asm.org/images/stories/documents/FAQ_Human_Microbiome.pdf http://academy.asm.org/images/stories/documents/FAQ_Human_Mi... -- see pages 11+ [5] We have a bibliography at http://www.generalbiotics.com/science http://www.generalbiotics.com/science edit: my co-founder wishes me to point out that I wrote this was to illustrate why eating ancestrally normal microbes is a plausible idea. Please don't take these links as me saying my product can prevent any diseases -- I don't have sufficient evidence to support that claim.