Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

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> The gut is often called the second brain, and lots of mental health issues like anxiety, depression, stress, etc can be greatly helped by improving diet and healthy gut.

Who calls it that? I've seen a comment or two before, but certainly not "everyone" calling it that. It's a nice analogy that probably could be stretched way too far, as these things go.

Are the causal links clearly _known_ or correlation shows that the link may be identifiable?

> It’s criminal that medical establishments are controlled by pharmaceutical companies and establishment media spreads prescription drug propaganda.

Hmm... this sounds like conspiratorial thinking. Do you have evidence of this, and if it is the case, a reason why this status quo is worse than other alternatives?

> Everyone needs to do their own research about gut health and direct impacts to physical and mental health.

Why? Wouldn't it be more reasonable for scientists to research, work towards consensus, then report findings, rather than duplicating the fixed costs of setting up laboratories and health testing facilities in our garages? Considering I did this, what is the likelihood I find a stronger connection or novel fact about certain microbiota that inhabit my or my families' bodies? Or perhaps you're being less precise in your terminology, and you're advocating that people study scientists' research rather than conducting wetlab studies. Could you clarify?

Analogously, we should also all study the universe, but few advocate for all to build radio telescopes on their available rooftops.

>Who calls it that?

It comes from some studies[1] that show a large number of neurons in the gut which control subsystems, which number about as much as a cat brain. This is interesting and makes things more complicated than initially thought, but is a bit apples to oranges; just having as many neurons as a cat brain doesn't mean they operate like you hacked a brain into your gut.

Spitballing here, but this probably started as an analogy to show the number of neurons, and people started thinking it was an actual brain.

[1]https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...

(Maybe not the best source, but google "human gut cat brain" and you'll see this view all over the place.)

Makes sense. So the neurons themselves are not an analogy, but their operational status perhaps is. I appreciate you humoring me.

I don’t have anything to add to this brilliant response but I’d like to say how much I appreciate it.

I’m curious as to why you think it’s brilliant response?

Was it the lack of initiative to do simple google search on gut brain physiological connections? The common phrases gut feeling, gut check, gut intuition are related to the gut brain connection.

Was it the lack of insight into the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on prescription drug propaganda? Google how pharma company marketed Oxicontin, which was huge part of opioid addiction crisis.

Was it the lack of clarity in the scientific community reproducibility crisis? Especially in the drug development fields, where Big Pharma has big incentives to push through dangerous drugs on people? Please Google prescription drug called Vioxx.

Programming and software fields are full of people with steep disregard for culturally established theories and truisms.

Until some VC backed tech company builds a product around a 1000+ year old theory, it seems to hold no water in this community.

"Analogously, we should also all study the universe, but few advocate for all to build radio telescopes on their available rooftops. "

But the conditions of the stars are not linked to our well being (unless you are into astrology).

But the condition of our gut microbiome is.

I simply read the comment as a urge to investigate about your own biome. What works and what helps you individually, with the methods you have avaiable. Like checking what you eat, your medicines ... and how that affects your well being. Good indicator for health is .. a good shit so to say. But yeah, if you have a lab avaiable, or know a competent one, why not also professionally investigate your digestion outcome.

Perhaps you missed the big pharma conspiracy.

I ignored that part mostly ...

But that big pharma does things, that strenghten peoples believe in conspiracy is sadly not far off:

For example about Sanofi, a french pharma company. On the german Wiki page is a section criticsm, stating various bad things, like not telling about side effects of drugs and trying to suppress that knowledge in various cases and testing in poor countries with lax standards, etc.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanofi#Kritik

(one english link: https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/big-pharma-small-startup)

But nothing to be seen on the english version for example. And I heard countless other stories, of which most were surely crackpot realm, but not at all everything, so I am also not really a fan of big pharma.

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