4 ms·

We actually know shockingly little about a lot of topics relative to our bodies. One big reason for this is that, ethically, we can't just go experiment on live

by exelius 12y ago

We actually know shockingly little about a lot of topics relative to our bodies. One big reason for this is that, ethically, we can't just go experiment on live humans. But genetics and human biological systems may only play a part of how nutrition affects us. As an example, science is just now coming around to is that the bacteria in our intestines has a huge impact on how our body reacts to food - and that those bacteria vary wildly from person to person. Some peoples' intestinal bacteria are better at breaking down different types of fat, sugar or protein than others. Some people are lactose intolerant. Slight variations in the intestinal bacteria levels might even lead to obesity or other metabolic disorders - we just don't know because nobody's found a good way to study it yet. The net is that the human body is far more complex an organism than I think many people realize. DNA only tells part of the story. The entire way we design studies and test hypotheses is practically prehistoric - there's so much noise in the data that we can't pick out the signal because we don't even know what to look for. We're getting better data - which is helping - but we're still flying in the dark about this subject because there's no ethical way to disassemble a living human and perform the types of horrible experiments we can perform on machines or animals.

DanBC 12y ago
> One big reason for this is that, ethically, we can't just go experiment on live humans The US has an enormous prison population. They get fed for $2.50 per day. Is it possible to recruit prisoners ethically to take part in diet research?
- exelius 12y ago
  Just think how much progress we could make in neurology if we could open up prisoners' brains and tinker around with them? Or to link back to the nutrition topic, what if we could just take prisoners and replace their intestinal bacteria with different mixes of gut bacteria? Continue to feed them a control diet and see who lives, who dies, who gets fat and who loses weight. Obviously, that experiment would be terrible -- but we'd find out pretty quickly what the "magic formula" is. Could we bioengineer a gut bacteria biome such that an otherwise unmodified human could consume crude oil as a source of nutrition? How about one that can't get drunk because the bacteria break down the ethanol right in the stomach? We probably could -- but many people would die in the research process. I'm not saying that we should do this type of research -- but our lack of ability to do it has hampered our understanding of the human body, and will continue to slow progress relative to other scientific fields where such research IS ethically possible (e.g. building the LHC to understand subatomic particles).
- chadgeidel 12y ago
  It is in the same way it's possible to ethically recruit non-prisoners to take part in diet research. That is - it is not ethical.
- Fomite 12y ago
  Recruiting prisoners is actually a huge pain - they're one of several protected categories (along with children and soldiers) based on the potential that their "consent" isn't really all that consenting. In my mind, this exists for good reason, but it does kill almost any study that doesn't absolutely need to be conducted on prisoners for their own benefit.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- angelbob 12y ago
  Current ethics boards say "no". It's a debatable point -- a lot of things that ethics boards forbid might be, in some way, reasonable to study in some specific cases. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and ethics boards (correctly) draw simple lines in a place where they'll forbid a very high percentage of the bad stuff and a small-ish but not very small percentage of the good stuff. You're going to get errors when you draw simple lines. Ethics boards are conservative about where the lines go. They should be.
themagician 12y ago
Excellent points. I think what it really highlights is that, for most food items, there is no right or wrong answer as to how good/bad it is for you. There is some directional information, but even that should be taken with limited confidence.
- exelius 12y ago
  Exactly - there are correlations, but there's no definitive answer either way. For some people, a high-carb diet may lead to weight gain and increased levels of LDL in the blood -- while others on the exact same diet may not see those issues, even with the same diet. We don't know what causes the difference, and it may not be possible to design an ethical study to discover it.

by exelius 12y ago

DanBC 12y ago

> One big reason for this is that, ethically, we can't just go experiment on live humans The US has an enormous prison population. They get fed for $2.50 per day. Is it possible to recruit prisoners ethically to take part in diet research?

exelius 12y ago
Just think how much progress we could make in neurology if we could open up prisoners' brains and tinker around with them? Or to link back to the nutrition topic, what if we could just take prisoners and replace their intestinal bacteria with different mixes of gut bacteria? Continue to feed them a control diet and see who lives, who dies, who gets fat and who loses weight. Obviously, that experiment would be terrible -- but we'd find out pretty quickly what the "magic formula" is. Could we bioengineer a gut bacteria biome such that an otherwise unmodified human could consume crude oil as a source of nutrition? How about one that can't get drunk because the bacteria break down the ethanol right in the stomach? We probably could -- but many people would die in the research process. I'm not saying that we should do this type of research -- but our lack of ability to do it has hampered our understanding of the human body, and will continue to slow progress relative to other scientific fields where such research IS ethically possible (e.g. building the LHC to understand subatomic particles).
chadgeidel 12y ago
It is in the same way it's possible to ethically recruit non-prisoners to take part in diet research. That is - it is not ethical.
Fomite 12y ago
Recruiting prisoners is actually a huge pain - they're one of several protected categories (along with children and soldiers) based on the potential that their "consent" isn't really all that consenting. In my mind, this exists for good reason, but it does kill almost any study that doesn't absolutely need to be conducted on prisoners for their own benefit.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
angelbob 12y ago
Current ethics boards say "no". It's a debatable point -- a lot of things that ethics boards forbid might be, in some way, reasonable to study in some specific cases. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and ethics boards (correctly) draw simple lines in a place where they'll forbid a very high percentage of the bad stuff and a small-ish but not very small percentage of the good stuff. You're going to get errors when you draw simple lines. Ethics boards are conservative about where the lines go. They should be.

themagician 12y ago

Excellent points. I think what it really highlights is that, for most food items, there is no right or wrong answer as to how good/bad it is for you. There is some directional information, but even that should be taken with limited confidence.

exelius 12y ago
Exactly - there are correlations, but there's no definitive answer either way. For some people, a high-carb diet may lead to weight gain and increased levels of LDL in the blood -- while others on the exact same diet may not see those issues, even with the same diet. We don't know what causes the difference, and it may not be possible to design an ethical study to discover it.