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Comment by danesparza | Hacker News Reader

inhibits the growth of various microorganisms and plants but is harmless to humans and animals

But what about gut biome? I would think if you injested this, it could seriously harm the natural (and good) biome inside of humans or animals. Am I misreading this?

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Oh, great. More product to sterilize the soil and reduce microbiome. I've had farmers tell me that they wanted a more accurate free-carbon soil test because it was indicative of microbiome activity, and by extension indicative of healthy soil. Farmers know the importance of active microbiome in the soil and I suspect they won't want to kill it off as it will further increase the burden of farmers to overfertilize.

no they effing do not!!

I grew up with a few....they bought the 1960s chemical company line what is good for Monsanto is good for farmers...

They're just like consumers... Incredibly varied.

We need transparency.

Ingesting this could probably do some nasty things to your gut biome - but remember that we're talking about an herbicide. If you ingested most herbicides you'd be dead shortly after, so this could be much safer.

Edit - ingested herbicides at any meaningful quantity.

I think it's still reasonable to fear some ambient level of this stuff could do us harm over time despite being marketed as 'harmless'. See: asbestos.

I think it's still reasonable to fear some ambient level of this stuff could do us harm over time despite being marketed as 'harmless'. See: asbestos.

Or heroin, cocaine, morphine, OxyContin, radioactive drinking water, bleeding the sick, DDT, Lead drinking vessels and pipes, doctors not washing their hands between an autopsy and a birth, taking antimony pills as a purgative, and... you get the idea.

Herbicides kill plants. Many of them are safe to drink, the only way to die is drink enough to drown.

Agreed. It’s pesticides you don’t want to touch.

Herbicides are pesticides

Insecticides are pesticides

Pesticide is a blanket term

</pedantic>

And no, you don't want to touch insecticides; they are generally neurotoxins.

Ah thanks for the pedantry - yes I meant insecticides in that case. I thought pesticide only meant insecticide.

The soil also has a powerful biome that we're only beginning to understand. (https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detailfull/soils/h...)

If it is harmless to humans then it wouldn't seriously harm any biome relied upon by humans, it seems.

It says it targets prototrophs, which are microbes that use the same nutrients as the parent organism. In this case it appears the microbes have a similar metabolic pathway in common with plants to uptake the pseudo sugar.

It seems that the sugar mess with the creation of Tryptophan in microorganisms. We are unable to synthesize it, so we don't have this methabolic path. So far, so good. We could share our Tryptophan (from chocolate, milk, red meat, fish, eggs...) with the gut microbioma, solving the problem in part but:

1) It seems that tryptophan is related with control of inflamatory processes. I understand (but I could be wrong, is not my speciality) that therefore a healthy level of Tryptophan in gut protects us from developping crohn's disease and similar problems.

2) And as Tryptophan can be used to make serotonin and melatonin, It seems that badly stressed humans had yet low levels of Tryptophan. I'm hypothesizing that this sugar could be particularly harmful to them, even if is proven safe for non stressed people.

3) Tryptophan is needed for melatonin production.

4) And, low levels of tryptophan lead to obesity. Tryptophan triggers the "stop eating" satiety message, so stressed people typically eat continuously, and gain a lot of weight.

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