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Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

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Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lactase persistence is regulated by genetic mutations, not gut microbes. The negative symptoms of lactose intolerance is exactly due to lactose being able to reach the gut and making the microbes there flourish by digesting lactose, creating large quantities of gas and other metabolic byproducts that cause flatulence, diarrhea, etc. People don't spontaneously become lactose intolerant just because they stopped eating…

Honest question: I grew up on a farm in former USSR. We milked cows daily, when I was a kid. Back then, I never knew about lactose intolerance but to be fair, this wasn’t a topic discussed. Considering I know nothing about this, and you seem like you do, are there any studies that looked at links between lactose intolerance and fresh milk produce? Reason I say “fresh” is because we never refrigerated the milk. In the…

Fresh milk is linked with some viruses that can cause autoimmune diseases like type-1 diabetes and bunch of other stuff.

Always makes my eyes roll when I hear people driving hours just to get fresh farm milk.

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#222

I'm curious how simple sanitary factors come into play. Something I've always found intriguing is that in Ancient Greece toilets would use shared butt brushes (sponge on a stick) in lieu of toilet paper. In an especially fancy place there might be a bucket of vinegar nearby to clean it off, but in general it was just a quick swirl through some water and onto the next bum. The thing I find interesting there is that th…

It seems like it’s about statistics, more than anything. Some people can be sedentary and smoke their whole lives and eat lard non stop and still live to be 80. Doesn’t mean any of that helped them in any way.

It’s like that for them, too; regardless of their sanitary practices, some people will live to be old. On its own I don’t think it says much about their effectiveness.

Long-lived people have always existed. The difference is in the % of people that make it that far.

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#223
post #121
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing that this means there are a lot of confounding variables other than gut biome (environment, diet, genetics, etc) that are very difficult to isolate to prove causation, as opposed to correlation.

Gut biome being one of the most promising area of research, whose earth-shattering potential is about on par with the sheer complexity of the problem. If you thought ML was difficult, try modeling a human being's digestive tube from mouth to anus down to the cell: welcome to a category of problems where climate and gravity are the "simple" ones. On the other side of that space though, potentially the promise to incre…

I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that the workings of the human brain are still far more complex than that of our digestive system. If the amount of effort that has been put into trying to emulate the former with software had been put instead into trying to emulate the latter, I reckon we'd pretty much have it cracked by now (as in, you could feed some tool info corresponding to all the inputs into our digestive system and it would be able to spit out exactly what outputs would be produced in the average human). But unlike AI/ML, not enough people, ahem, give a shit...

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#224
post #161

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 tha…

> 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.

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.

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#225
post #161

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 tha…

> 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.

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.

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#226
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lactase persistence is regulated by genetic mutations, not gut microbes. The negative symptoms of lactose intolerance is exactly due to lactose being able to reach the gut and making the microbes there flourish by digesting lactose, creating large quantities of gas and other metabolic byproducts that cause flatulence, diarrhea, etc. People don't spontaneously become lactose intolerant just because they stopped eating…

> Lactase persistence is regulated by genetic mutations, not gut microbes. > Koreans eat lots of fermented vegetables, yet why are 70%-100% of Koreans estimated to be lactose intolerant? On the other hand, there is Mongolia: > But a closer look at cultural practices around the world has challenged that picture. In modern Mongolia, for example, traditional herders get more than a third of their calories from dairy pro…

So how exactly does the diet of Mongolians prove lactase persistence is not fundamentally genetic? Lactose intolerance isn't something like celiacs where a dash of the substance causes adverse reactions. Most of Asia still sell non-lactose-free dairy in supermarkets. Look up any Youtube video of Korean street foods and you will see dairy products such as processed cheese, yogurt, mil, and ice cream are ubiquitous in Korea. That doesn't detract from the fact that the vast majority of the population are lactose intolerant in the definition that they no longer produce enzymes that can break down lactose once reaching adulthood.

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#227
post #161

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 tha…

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 l…

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

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#228
post #190
post #45

Pretty much every culture around the world 100 years ago had some staple fermented food. Nowadays, a lot of people in western culture at least outright refuse yogurt or other fermented foods like saurkraut or pickled cabbage that used to be staples in these people's ancestor's diets a few generations ago. People are becoming even lactose intolerant. You have to fertilize your microbes so to speak and eat these sorts…

Zero added sweetener, straight Greek yoghurt. Absolutely sublime. To the typical North American diet it tastes incredibly foreign because the US of A is drenched in sweeteners. But unsweetened foods just taste beautiful once you get used to them.

Its amazing the incredible, over the top flavor that highly processed junk food has. Commercial Corn chips and the like are so over flavoured, but you don't notice until you give them up for a while.

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#229

I think the consensus is nobody really knows and nutritional science is largely trendy pseudoscience…

I've always been shocked at how crappy the research into nutrition is and how there's very little consensus beyond "vegetables are good" and how shoddy a lot of the professional training is for dieticians. Nearly everybody eats nearly every day, how have we not figured this out?

I don't think that's necessarily the case.

There is much more that we know than just "Vegetables are good" and we know why they're good. Nutrient dense, packed with fiber to slow digestion, includes necessarily vitamins and minerals to not only absorb the nutrients of your food but to also provide you with the micronutrients you need.

That's of course just one example you made. But the problem is where people go to find the right information. Don't watch instagrammers and don't look at the latest "super foods" where the benefits might only be marginal, albeit hardly palatable.

Having studied nutrition and human movement in first year University, my recommendation is for people to actually buy a first year Uni textbook on nutrition and understand what is in your food, what energy systems are, what macro (carbs, fats, proteins), micro (vitamins, minerals) are and how they impact your body. Then you can go and make more informed decisions about what you eat without someone necessarily telling you. You'll know that sugar isn't bad for you, but copious amounts of simple carbs like Mars bars are especially if you're not exercising.

Top level Athletes and body builders are the way they are because of how they train and but largely how and what they eat. If we didn't know that much about nutrition we wouldn't have many world class athletes. As the saying goes, you can't outrun a bad diet and that's true.

If you could afford a sports dietitian, I guarantee they'll know what you should be eating in combination with exercise to be healthy.

A big problem with the Nutrition industry is that its easy to make big positive leaps in what you eat, without it being a bowl of kale and beetroot. The challenge is people's ability to be able to plan and cook properly between their busy lives where nutritionally simple foods are more readily available. Additionally, in today's world of many of us sitting in offices all day, you cannot live a healthy life purely based on what you eat, you need to move your body and exercise as well.

Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

#230
post #192
post #161

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 tha…

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 negati…

> 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.

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