The Theory of Gut Bacteria Value | Hacker News Reader

The Theory of Gut Bacteria Value

atvbt.com

41 pointsubac29 comments

"After the decline of traditional faith, the ensuing churn of political religions makes me believe that total religiosity is largely conserved; we’ve just been shuffling it around between better or worse vessels."

The conservation of religiosity makes a lot of sense. Religious behavior keeps re-emerging because it isn't something done to us, imposed from outside, but because it is somehow produced by our own psycho-biology.

That's something of an argument for secular organizations to adapt the trappings and ceremonies of religions, to make themselves more sustainable by satisfying those inherent cravings. The military seems to have discovered this.

This is my perspective as a life-long atheist, trying to understand the behavior of normal humans. But it may be like a color blind person trying to understand the reaction to a vibrant painting. Maybe I just lack the sense to detect the external religiosity beamed to me by an omnipresent deity.

> because it isn't something done to us, imposed from outside

You assumed it isn't still something being done to us, being imposed from the outside. I doubt that's right. It was a useful tool of power before, it probably still is. Why do you think it's produced by our own psycho-biology?

We are wired to want to participate in a social system. To belong. To have a common enemy. I propose organized sports!

A massive ritualized practice with its own symbols, laws, large structures, sacrifices, regional variants, written and unwritten codes of ethics, hierarchies of permissions and enforcement that sometimes involve costume and decorated carriages...

I'm talking about commuting, of course!

Sacrafices? :D

Potential ancestors who didn't experience the dread of possibly being watched from the tall grass were more likely to be eaten. And so we begin to believe in the unseen.

Seems like a giant leap from being aware of yoir surroundings being benefi i to having a habit of inventing invisible superheroes who are the ultimate moral judges of the universe...

It's also a giant leap from morganucodon to homo sapiens, which is to say it's a vast amount of tiny leaps over eons.

Yes; however, the mechanism of one is well documented and understood and comes with a predictive theory, while the other is so far just speculation of somone on the Internet.

While I'm flattered that you think I could have come up with it, I must confess it wasn't my idea https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14694-superstitions-e...

> adapt the trappings and ceremonies of religions

Watching its weird icons puttering by, I always felt like ClearCase was failing in an attempt to do this.

I mean, I would be surprised if you lacked the “sense of color” altogether. But I will say that, it needs to be cultivated over time.

That the trappings and ceremonies of religion are co-opted by power-structures and televangelists and faith healers to divide and exploit and extract money from... To us religious these are true wolves in sheep-clothing.

I don't think you should seek the answer in a biological imperative to be religious. Instead try to see the Chasm. A yawning chasm saying that we are not worth it, that what we do shall not amount to anything, that all is lost/hopeless, that in the long run you are unloved and unlovable... That is the Chasm.

The experience of the Chasm is very common, and the need to run away from it is very real. Things we do to run away from it include social structures like blaming/ridiculing others, various addictions and obsessions to numb it, food and TV and relationships and sometimes even drugs. Marx saw religion as just another one of these, not evil intrinsically—but he thought the Chasm to come from folks' reactions to their own enslavement and that there wouldn't be a Chasm after we abolished wage slavery.

But religiosity in the sense you mean is better understood as the part where we turn and fight, where we take a stand against the Chasm rather than running forever. Its ubiquity comes from the common problem it attempts to solve, not from some random biological preset. Us religious folks continue because we think we have found something strong enough to fight it, whether it is Jesus or the truth of no-self or the pursuit of a cosmic Harmony or something else entirely.

Fecal transplants have proven effective for treating a range of diseases, so this cannot be true. That we do not yet understand what is going on does not mean there is nothing going on.

> Fecal transplants have proven effective for treating a range of diseases

They can be very effective for C. diff infections, but beyond that it’s not as much of a wonder treatment as the initially hype suggested. There have been a lot of startups and researchers working on this space with very lackluster results (outside of C. diff, that is)

They are effective for a number of ailments you would expect and many you wouldn't. We are at the beginning of understanding these processes better. I wouldn't think we are at a point where we can look at specific results and making general statments.

L. Reuteri 17938 + Glycerol kills C. Diff.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28760934/

Biogaia's Gastrus has it.

To be fair, this is not inconsistent with the position of the article.

If the disease states are a result of pathogenic invasion, restoring the natural inhabitants of the gut by transplant and driving out the 'bad guys' by doing so is completely consistent.

Whether you call that 'doing nothing' is of course a different matter; it's a bit like explaining armor as 'doing nothing' because it just sits there and soaks up incoming physical damage!

A good and pretty entertaining book [1] / video [2] is made by Giulia Enders. I did just watched, read the German version.

[1] https://www.darm-mit-charme.de/buch.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODJwP8C48cE

> What do gut bacteria do again? ...

> Well, I’m here to tell you that they do nothing.

Utter tripe. After getting a cardiac stent placed last April, I did a deep dive on cardiovascular disease. I landed on work from the Cleveland Clinic by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. In his long-term studies, he finds that bacteria in the gut metabolize certain proteins found in meat and dairy into trimethethylamine, which the liver metabolizes into trimethylamine-oxide (TMAO). TMAO annihilates the nitric oxide blood gas created by the endothelium to protect and repair itself. In other words, that is the root cause of CVD.

That, my friends, is not nothing.

The author of this piece claiming that gut bacteria have no impact on the body's biochemistry is being willfully ignorant of years of well-established studies. At the very least, for the one, narrow interest where I have done a deep dive.

Is there any bacteria in particular that you would recommend for preventing CVD?

Also, you should probably say it’s ‘a’ root cause. I’m aware of other theories that place a big emphasis on an imbalance between calcium and magnesium/k2 intake.

The next paragraph, “They have numerous benefits, but possibly the most important is just existing and taking up space so that bad bacteria have nowhere to invade.” Everything you shared corroborates the author’s claim.

TLDR: It hypothesizes that gut bacteria "do nothing" other than crowd out bad bacteria, which is extremely valuable in its own right.

It's a good read about a valuable concept, never mind that I don't agree on the basic premise that gut bacteria "do nothing."

I cannot help being underwhelmed by papers on the so-called 'microbiome.' Very seldom is it something more complex than proportion/prevalence of species X correlates with behavior/health outcome Y. Simple correlations with all sorts of imaginable confounding variables that preclude causal explanations. Even in totally hypothesis-free, exploratory studies, almost all variation in species density over time gets explained by two or three PCA components, and gut bacterial populations seem to grow/shrink independently with respect to other populations. These dynamics, whatever they may be, are a far cry from such a lofty, puffed-up term like micro-'biome', where its use always signifies complex (and conveniently uncharacterized!) dynamics of bacterial species interacting with each other and the host.

That said, I don't find the author's framing of this particularly useful. If a theory is wrong, it will be wrong for factual, technical reasons. The extent to which some real phenomena can predict others is testable. Handwaving it away as social contagion, ideology, or mass hysteria --- not that those don't exist, medieval dance fever being my favorite example --- isn't good enough for me.

In terms of relative frequency of different species while it changes all the time there are some well proven examples of health impacts. For example the rare cases when gut fungi or bacteria start producing significant quantities of alcohol. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513346/

What else would you call it other than microbiome? Gut flora used to be popular but as with the case above what someone eats can often play a role behind what’s living in their gut.

A compelling introduction but not really sure how the connections are made.

Comparing the general value of more things in an ecosystem representing passive or neutral characteristics as a net positive.

I think the other examples are different given the “addition by subtraction” of these things improving with the natural evolution / diminishing effect of them.

This was a strange article. It seemed to rant about various topics, starting with Gut Bacteria and ending with religion

Should probably be titled "the value of placebos". Comparing gut bacteria (without a good mix of which which we would be pretty ill) with homeopathy is like comparing oranges with, well, homeopathy.

This is a strange article that has no real sources, makes a broad conjecture about an entire field of research, then goes into tangents about homeopathy, Tik Tok, and religion.

And yet somehow, it feels par for the course when it comes to pop-science microbiome discussion. The entire field of microbiome research has been greatly overhyped despite very mixed and lackluster results in studies. You can go out and find individual studies claiming that certain gut bacteria are associated with certain conditions or that certain probiotics are associated with certain outcomes, but it’s much harder to find those results replicated again or even proven out in the real world, with a few minor exceptions.

Meanwhile, the more philosophically minded writers have latched on to all of this uncertainty and ambiguity as an opening to inject their own pet theories or hypothesize that various disease stages are related to something vague with the microbiome. It’s reminiscent of how misunderstandings of quantum physics are often used to justify quack theories because the reader may not know how to separate quantum physics fact from fiction.

I’m still optimistic that some value will come from microbiome research, but it’s not going to come from wandering blog posts like this.

The associations between gut microbes and disease may be valid, but simply not actionable. The gut has incredible size, and is thousands of niches rather than a bag of marbles.

The oral microbiome, however, is an entirely different story. Decades of research show causal links between oral bacteria and disease. And it’s readily accessible so it can be easily tested and modulated.

Let’s stop using “microbiome” to describe the gut only. The gut microbiome may be full of overhyped studies, but the oral microbiome or the skin microbiome are entirely different stories.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com