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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

#281

Post by samstave »

epgui wrote: post #11
samstave wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

You're right, I don't see the humour in this. And it's not pedantic to question a misquoting when the meaning is completely different. Nor is it pedantic to question the relevance of someone's comment. I don't think this quote means what you think it means.

>>that being mindful about the language we choose to accept socially is in general radical

Yeah, you're a hypocrite.

I am not upset, but based on your comment history, I actually expect higher of you.

"question a misquoting" Give me a FN break...

Your feigned self-righteous demeanor simply devalues your Truth, and I am assured that you will defend your mental superiority, regardless..

My Grandmother, would oft state:

"often in err, never in doubt"

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

#282

Post by lbeltrame »

nebfield wrote: post #265
rvba wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big are the samples analyzed by the machine? 1 gram? 1 miligram? Are they taken from random parts of the poop? (Outside, inside?) Even 1 miligram is probably a lot of DNA, but I wonder how to know if the place of sampling is important

Very small amounts are sampled, on the order of grams. I'm not sure exactly, I worked on the bioinformatics side of things. I think an Illumina MiSeq requires 50 - 500 nanograms of DNA to work well. Sampling and storage methods can significantly change the bacterial composition of an environmental sample (in this case, poop). The exact protocols will depend on the aims of the study. The gut microbiome is a gradient a…

> I think an Illumina MiSeq requires 50 - 500 nanograms of DNA to work well.

You can go as low as 10ng depending on the library you use (or so the vendors say), but I'm not sure it's the case for these specific applications (my experience is with other, equally difficult samples, but from a single source).

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

#283

Post by K0SM0S »

epgui wrote: post #279
deepstack wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo, we are just bunch of bacteria walking around. Some organism become symbiotic over time like mitochondria, so it go incorporated into our cells to make energy. The whole concept that we as human-being is one organism needs to be revisited.

This is already understood, it's not like scientists aren't aware. The simplified concept of humans being one organism will continue to be taught nonetheless, because it's extremely useful, and not even wrong in most contexts in which it's applied. There's nothing special about this, you can say the same thing about any simple model in biology: that the brain is an organ inside the head is a simplification, any diagr…

Even more generally, reductionism works but with known limitations which warrant a more holistic approach, and we can't work our way out of most real-world problems without this multi-layered approach. Welcome to empiricism in complex systems.

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

#285

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

NoPicklez wrote: post #229
starwind wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> 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.

A lot to unpack here. Did deeper, do we really need those micronutrients which make "Vegetables are good". To me, to the extent I dug up, the answer is no.

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

#286

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

onkoe wrote: post #117
starwind wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Everyone wants to be the one eating - no one wants to be the foodless researcher.

Also mortgages to pay, and mouths of feed of this little brats they pop out are all valid reasons....

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

#287

Post by colordrops »

corsac wrote: post #277
colordrops wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fermented foods are important. Milk-based foods, not so much. There's a reason most people are lactose intolerant - milk is to grow baby cows into large animals, and not suitable for consumption by adult humans.

> milk is to grow baby cows into large animals Whence this transcendent purpose that limits suitability? Likewise, quinoa grains are to grow into full-sized plants, and not for consumption by humans, etc. etc. Most people may be "lactose intolerant", but some of them find ways to survive and thrive on milk-based foods; meanwhile, some populations have developed tolerance to lactose, presumably because milk-based food…

There is no need for transcendant purpose. Quinoa intolerance is pretty uncommon, whereas milk intolerance is the norm. Even without a lactose intolerance, there are several health issues with milk consumption, unlike quinoa consumption. That is because we've evolved for a orders of magnitude longer to eat plant material.

Yes, some northern European peoples have evolved to be more tolerant of milk. And some tibetans have evolved to live at very high altitudes. It's not a good argument to take a small exceptional population and apply that reasoning to the general case.

And this doesn't even get into all the problems with the dairy industry with regards to environmental damage and animal suffering.

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

#288

Post by epgui »

samstave wrote: post #281
epgui wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I don't see the humour in this. And it's not pedantic to question a misquoting when the meaning is completely different. Nor is it pedantic to question the relevance of someone's comment. I don't think this quote means what you think it means.

>> that being mindful about the language we choose to accept socially is in general radical Yeah, you're a hypocrite. I am not upset, but based on your comment history, I actually expect higher of you. "question a misquoting" Give me a FN break... Your feigned self-righteous demeanor simply devalues your Truth, and I am assured that you will defend your mental superiority, regardless.. My Grandmother, would oft state…

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

#289

Post by asdff »

colordrops wrote: post #273
asdff wrote: 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…

Fermented foods are important. Milk-based foods, not so much. There's a reason most people are lactose intolerant - milk is to grow baby cows into large animals, and not suitable for consumption by adult humans.

There's also a reason why some people can digest milk: its a resource with nutrients and being able to intake a new source of nutrients offers a selective advantage to your offspring relative to offspring that cannot make use of these nutrients present in the environment. To say its not suitable for consumption by humans is a falsehood considering many adult humans can and do consume milk and make use of its nutrients.

You could posit this argument about anything we consume. Spinach leaves are to provide energy through photosynthesis for the spinach plant, and technically should not be suitable by consumption by adult humans so to speak if we took your logic to the limit. The fact that we have experienced gain of function mutations that allow us to digest spinach and recieve some nutrient benefit from it mean that we are able to take advantage of this resource. Milk in this sense is no different, even if not all of the human population has recieved this gain of function mutation of lactase persistance.

In biology there is no 'suitable' or not especially in the human sense of things being properly defined into discrete categories of expected outcomes, only what is physically posible through thermodynamics. If you physically can extract energy from plants, meat, milk, dirt, whatever, then its all suitable for consumption. having an enzyme to digest this sugar is no different than having teeth fit to grind down fibrous plant matter, or teeth strong and sharp enough to cut through cartilage and sinew.

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

#290

Post by asdff »

colordrops wrote: post #287
corsac wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> milk is to grow baby cows into large animals Whence this transcendent purpose that limits suitability? Likewise, quinoa grains are to grow into full-sized plants, and not for consumption by humans, etc. etc. Most people may be "lactose intolerant", but some of them find ways to survive and thrive on milk-based foods; meanwhile, some populations have developed tolerance to lactose, presumably because milk-based food…

There is no need for transcendant purpose. Quinoa intolerance is pretty uncommon, whereas milk intolerance is the norm. Even without a lactose intolerance, there are several health issues with milk consumption, unlike quinoa consumption. That is because we've evolved for a orders of magnitude longer to eat plant material. Yes, some northern European peoples have evolved to be more tolerant of milk. And some tibetans…

But in this case with this country, that small exceptional worldwide population is overrepresented in our national population. It stands to reason that many people can infact consume lactose in the U.S. given this demographic history. The general case in the context of the U.S. population could very well refer to this population of people historically predisposed to tolerate lactase.

And on the other hand, I think there is this false logic at play with the meat/dairy industry as a whole. People assume these interconnected systems are in fact discrete. That we could do away with eating meat and suffer no consequences, in fact even see improvement in our ways of life. I am not so optimistic given how interconnected systems are. For instance, take the cow. Its not just used to derive meat. 99% of the cow is used. The pancreas is used to extract insulin and other factors. Same with the liver, and the pituitary gland. Serum is used for biomedical research applications. The hair is used for products, the hide is used. The fats are used for everything from toothpaste to flooring to crayons. Collagen and gelatin are extracted. I don't even need to go into the uses of the hide, I feel. The bones and blood are used for organic fertilizer, so I'd wager that many organic vegetarian products today actually rely on the cheap organic fertilizers produced by the meat industry versus synthetic sources. On top of that pasture land is often land that is not compatible for traditonal farming, owing to terrain mostly (e.g. Summit county in Colorado sports a lot of ranching versus farming, due to the rocky mountainous terrain being almost impossible to plow but trivial for a grazer to roam on).

Could you replace all of the parts of the cow with synthetic sources? Certainly. Would this lead to a net reduction in greenhouse gasses and other environmental externalities replacing each and every of these products with synthetic sources that hopefully aren't any more costly? That I doubt, and it worries me that headlines and other material in the media seem to ignore how all these externalizes will be resolved, assuming it will be an easy transition.

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