Is Gut Science Biased?
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
Maybe if we want to do real science and not just find exactly and only what we were looking for, as we go into this new domain that is basically entirely unexplored, we should try to do so with open eyes instead of decades-old preconceptions.
Or it could just be that we're bad, bad people and should feel bad.
(Sorry. Well, sorry-ish. This unrelenting stream of "You Suck And Everything About You Is Wrong And We're Going To Mention It At Every Opportunity" in the news is really getting on my nerves after 30+ years of it.)
The human body is a magnificent contraption and you should listen to yours -- and not pundits. But people who are trying to "become one with their gut" are likely making themselves sick in other ways. There's way, way too much obsessive behavior around our bodies and it's not helpful. Easy to sell stuff to, though.
Why is there always a value judgment assumed? Why are you creating a false dichotomy between "it's out of my control" and "I'm a bad person"?
Perhaps you're simply not as sensitized to it as me, since it is becoming rather a raw spot with me. Go back and read the article again, carefully. Note how all the explanations of difference are assumed to be essentially moral failings of westerners, to eat "properly" [1] or exercise. Note the ingrained assumption that if there's a difference between the isolated primitive and the Westerner, the Westerner is automatically in the wrong, be it in behaviors or gut biomes, which they actually have to remind themselves may not be true, though they don't actually come up with any other possible explanations.
Mind you, I don't disagree that there are dietary issues in the Western diet or that there are exercise issues, but it's still bad science to presume in advance those are the only explanations to be considered, be it explicitly assumed or implicitly assumed. There's a world of variables out there and we've barely begun to shine a light.
[1]: Can't resist scare quoting since a lot of the people telling us what is "proper" in the past 40-50 years have also been dead wrong and quite possibly the dominant reason we're eating wrong in the first place; if not the dominant reason then certainly a huge one.
You are missing my point. Failure to eat "properly" or exercise is not a moral failing. The article never says that; you interpret it as such. I have failed to eat properly and exercise for most of my adult life. That does not make me a bad person. "Immoral" and "wrong" are not equivalent concepts; the former is a subset of the latter.
> Note the ingrained assumption that if there's a difference between the isolated primitive and the Westerner, the Westerner is automatically in the wrong, be it in behaviors or gut biomes, which they actually have to remind themselves may not be true, though they don't actually come up with any other possible explanations.
That's a problem in certain circles across all of medicine. Just look at the irrational support for "traditional Chinese medicine".
> Mind you, I don't disagree that there are dietary issues in the Western diet or that there are exercise issues, but it's still bad science to presume in advance those are the only explanations to be considered, be it explicitly assumed or implicitly assumed. There's a world of variables out there and we've barely begun to shine a light.
I agree, with medical science in particular suffering from this.
Only at the end of the article, someone else other than the author is quoted as saying that negative health outcomes can't be blamed on just your gut biome, but poor lifestyle choices as well.
Somehow this guy took this one statement, which is wholly correct and only points out the obvious, and turned it around to interpret the entire article as fat-shaming, and somehow misses the article's main purpose which is the lack of diversity in current data comparisons in this area of research.
The author says exactly what you're saying. They're pointing out that it's not so much what you're putting into your body as what you're comparing it to, and right now we're not comparing it to large enough or a diverse enough samples of the population.
This is one of the core hooks of many forms of advertising. The ads don't come out and say that, of course. But a lot of commercially supported (directly or indirectly) media content will say it (bluntly and/or obliquely). If you aren't paying for the media content, then chances are you are the product and are being sold to.
The food, pharma and medical industries in the US (and in many parts of the world) are commingled to the point that for long-term health management, I "trust but verify" all the information I obtain from them. There's some weird cousin of regulatory capture going on between the food-pharma-medical tripod, and an overwhelming desire to model biological systems as one-size-fits-all when for those who can afford the frequent out-of-pocket testing and N=1 experimentation, some of those models break down badly. Metabolic syndrome is a big area where the standard model from the official channels is completely at odds with what a significant fraction of the patient population experiences, and there is only now grudging acknowledgement that some patients might not fit the standard model.
I hope the Theranos debacle doesn't set back the general trend towards individualized, frequent, high-fidelity biomarkers monitoring. I want a microscopic implant solution that samples hundreds of biomarkers every 5 minutes from dozens of monitoring sites in my body, so I can build my own individualized, evolving (using machine learning) predictive model of my body over time based upon historical data.
This will not become a science when someone perfects the one experiment that can answer questions. It becomes a science when people ask questions that they can falsify in ways that other people can replicate. It continues to be a science as long as that is the case.
Edit: I should point out that I misread the headline. I thought it was "Is Gut Science Based?" Not "Biased." .... so, I definitely had a more slanted reading of the article as I was going.
1.) Scientists know this and are aware of the caveats (as the article points out).
2.) It's likely that for many biochemical/physiological/medical questions the variation within a reasonably large sample of such a population (male/female, fit/non-fit, manual labor/office work, vegetarian/meat+potatoes, not to mention countless biochemical processes...) swamps out the variation among larger groups.
How many studies fail even with such a homogeneous sample? Tons! My point is biology is messy enough already, that it's likely we've got bigger problems to solve than incorporating different standards of living, continents etc.
Now it's true if you want to make broad claims about microbiota, by definition you have to actually sample much more widely than the WEIRDs. But again, if you want to make narrow claims about differences between healthy WEIRDs and non-healthy WEIRDs, maybe not. I'm sure it would help, but that doesn't mean those studies are useless!
The technologies enabling this kind of work (chiefly next-gen high throughput DNA/RNA sequencing) are about 10 years old. And they haven't really been in relatively low barrier to entry use for much longer than 3 or 4. We're studying a hugely complex system here, and it's the definition of early days. Bias is important, the article is absolutely correct to point it out, but it's way too early to make any conclusions one way or the other about what is important in the microbiome, or the value of the research to date.
The best we can say right now is, "It's probably very important, we don't know how just yet."
Experimenting with probiotics right now, and would love to hear about their effectiveness in a healthy diet.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2114342...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
Ie it's pretty clear they started out with the acronym and then searched for the letters to finish it off. Would this sht pass if someone wanted to come up with an acronym for the illiterate population of the world that subsist on less than $1 a day and ended up with UGLY (for the sake of example)?
I find it equally unpleasant when people denigrate groups - whether they perceive them as 'underprivileged' or 'privileged'.
2. Do you find it equally unpleasant when people make insulting remarks about their own group than about a group they don't belong to? I think the latter is usually considered worse.
3. Speaking of which, "self-hating SJW" is a term used to denigrate a group--in this case, a group you don't belong to--and to dismiss them as people without considering the validity of their ideas. That's a cognitive shortcut that could be harmful.
Is there any purpose to calling members of the developed world 'weird'? To me it's pure propagation of 'victimhood' culture - where being not white or not straight gives one 'victim points'.
I consider this racist and I'm calling it out.