Hacker News Reader

> "You Suck And Everything About You Is Wrong And We're Going To Mention It At Every Opportunity"

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.

> Or it could just be that we're bad, bad people and should feel bad.

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"?

If I were the one "creating" this, why would I be "tired" of it? All I'd have to do to stop it would be to just... stop it. But it's not me.

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.

> Note how all the explanations of difference are assumed to be essentially moral failings of westerners, to eat "properly" [1] or exercise.

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.

I just read the article, carefully, with your alleged claims in mind. I have no idea how you drew these conclusions about moral failings and such. They seem to go beyond reaching into the realm of imagining things that aren't even hinted at.

I have no idea how he came up with his rant either. The article says little to nothing along the lines of what he claims.

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.

I don't think you read the article.

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.

Exactly. Am I really to believe that people walking around in the time of Jesus were dropping off perfect #3 and #4s on the Bristol Stool Scale on a precise 24 hour cycle? And all that's different now because we have machines that make corn more digestible versus hitting it with a rock like we used to do?

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.