Secret to longevity may lie in the microbiome and the gut
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
* the authors have already started a company and pursued a patent on their ayurvedic-derived formulation
* the figure 1(a) in their paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-25382-z#Fig1) doesn't show a big difference from plain probiotics to their formulation, but does show some oddities in the Y-axis where, for the control group, there were clearly exactly just 10 flies' mortality measured (integer steps down), but apparently many, many more for other cases scaled to the 0-10 axis.
* it's unclear if the treatments/evaluations where blinded – the word 'blind' is not found in the Nature article
* the 1st comment on the Nature article wonders: "the control flies didn't live to their normal expected age or even close. What gives?"
(Perhaps the flies that lived longer just had more food in total?)
I think this paper has value, in that it basically replicates the SCFA diet results others have seen. But the qPCR graphs are kinda hopeless.
>the authors have already started a company and pursued a patent on their ayurvedic-derived formulation
The fruit fly microbiome is exactly 2 organisms. The human microbiome is somewhat more complex - several hundred genera at least. It's pretty hard to draw a connection between the microbiomes of these two animals.
It would make a huge difference if the OP simply called to be cautious for the given reason. This preserves the status of unknown to the validity of the reported fact without taking position one way or the other.
It is very disapointing that people can't make the difference and I maintain that such behavior is anti-scientific. Claiming the opposit doesn't make your point true.
People who make claims like this fishyness are people who have a very high opinion on their ability to distinguish true from false facts just by guessing. That's monkey science.
The factors I mention – fast patenting/profit-seeking, odd axes/combinations to get a result, unclear blinding, inconsistency with other expected fly lifetimes – are all the kinds of things correlated with flimsy results. It's usually wishful thinking, not conscious forgery, that leads such authors to overlook the weaknesses in their setup when they get a publishable/profitable result.
I do have a high opinion of my ability to detect flimsy results from the details (or missing details!) of a scientific paper, from decades of reading and watching which results hold up, and which don't.
You're practicing scientism – sacralizing certain procedures, titles, or outlets – rather than science here. Science requires a high standard of proof, and recognizing patterns of misreporting. There's even a strong case to be made that "most published research findings are false":
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
1. Wayyyyy too much industry involvement, much of it not properly disclosed (OP here is a classical and representative example).
2. Lots of research from relatively small and "less known" institutes, done by researchers with hard to verify credentials.
3. Low scientific standards. That'd include:
- Refusal to share data
- Refusal to share data analysis methods
- Not keeping the basics of a double-blinded test
- No reproduction, and not even the possibility of independent reproducibility, as the methods are described so vaguely.
- Refusal to share data
- Refusal to share data analysis methods
- Not keeping the basics of a double-blinded test
- No reproduction, and not even the possibility of independent reproducibility, as the methods are described so vaguely.
If only we had a metric for credible science that takes authors, institutions, publisher and funding sources into account....
I think it’d be better to have an agreement that only reporducible papers are credible. Ie data the paper is reported on (to include “cleaned” data) and any tools developed (software tools) must always be included. As well as funding for everything disclosed.
Ultimately though I think we may just be seeing the obsolescence of current statistical theory. Science needs hypotheses to be testable in “trustable” metrics. But there are too many loop holes if things like p-hacking are possible.
Remember when it was vitamin D?
But they are still way better than the diseases they cure, and definitely better than death!
Toxins move up the food chain, and with humans being pretty much the top of that chain we shouldn't be dumping medicine into livestock just to keep them from getting sick.
Got the common cold? Here's some Amoxicillin!
I feel as though there is some degree of ostrich-syndrome when it comes to the deterioration of American physical and mental health. Something is causing this change, and most convenient explanations (lethargic lifestyles, internet, etc) do not really work since that would imply a comparable decline in other areas that have also seen such changes, yet the correlations there are spotty at best.
A lot of factors are probably involved as you say, but if I had to guess at the elephant-in-the-room dominant factor I'd say it's the US's model of what's euphemistically called "health care" and "health insurance." It's a complete no-brainer that people who can't afford medical treatment are dying earlier.
Cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke, diabetic complications, etc are where the big increases are coming from. And nearly all the major causes of death that are increasing are strongly linked with obesity, which is skyrocketing out of control. This is what I was alluding to early when suggesting that this change is, in turn, blamed on lethargic lifestyles, the internet, etc yet such changes are also happening in other nations yet they are not experiencing such radical shifts in lack of healthfulness.
I think it is implied that the cause of death is ageing? What else would it be (lab fruit flies don't have predators)?
I found a hint here: http://genomics.senescence.info/species/entry.php?species=Dr...
> Little is known about causes of death in old fruit flies but cardiac ageing has been reported [0981].
That sentence indicates that the question is not very well researched?
If that is true I find it amazing that there are ageing studies, shouldn't their own cause of death be well-known?
To @gweinberg, if you are reading this, what do you base this on? You wrote
> few of them die from age related causes
For comparison, dietary restriction increases longevity in rats and mice by up to 45%, but this may only be in lab animals
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...