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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Why is the parent comment not being downvoted to oblivion? It is making specific, deterministic claims and providing absolutely no sources whatsoever.

How does the OP know? Which university was it? Which research group? If "a research group" "found something worked" then there would be a trail of research papers leading up to whatever the patentable invention is.

This anecdote is a complete fabrication: events like this plain do not happen and shouldn't pass the snifftest for anyone: "a professor was paid off" - oh okay, well what about his graduate students? Honors students?

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1. I don't win anything by accusing a conglomerate with names on the internet. I don't mind being downvoted "to oblivion". I think I haven't because anyone interacting with such organisations imagines that this is not conspiracy, its business 2. I want to clarify that the company didn't say "we pay you X to keep it unpublished" they said "Oh thats interesting, we want to buy it to develop something based on it" and then they did nothing with it because it would canibalize their market. 3. Students that worked on this knew it, but they did nothing about it, the one I know the story from told me "what could I do? I finished my thesis and left, it was above me" and he actually works on a pharma now. I imagine being a vocal ethicist in this field would have left him without a job. Not something many people can afford.

"Oh thats interesting, we want to buy it to develop something based on it"

But it's a diet. There's nothing to sell with a diet, so again, what are you talking about?

But you know what let's run with this for a moment because it comes up a lot: you know what happens when a research group has an exciting new X, sells the patent on it and then nothing appears to happen? It doesn't actually work.

This story comes up a lot and frankly, HN should realise it: products are hard, hardware is even harder, try doing bio-anything even more so

There's not a conspiracy, which you are still trying to push with your comments here, the answer is just that it turns out not to work that well. Or that "revolutionary" actually means "minor overall improvement we generally expect from the market".

I appreciate your scepticism. I would probably do the same. Unfortunately I can't provide more information because its second-hand story and I just trust this person. Hence I did not verify everything they said. I do not know what kind of product they could develop from a diet (or if they ever wanted to). I know they had a product out for this and its an obvious conflict of interest.

I am not pushing any conspiracy here, my main points here was that gut microbiome is cutting edge research, and its actually a multi-disciplinary one since most nutritionists don't know a lot about the gut, and most gut doctors don't know a lot about nutrition (at least where I live). IBD is a prime candidate that I know of (but unfortunately I don't have a paper about it, because of whatever conspiracy or corporate greed reason) that can be helped with nutrition. But i've seen papers around talking about mental effects of the gut health too.

Why must we "downvote it to oblivion" just because the comment doesn't provide the particular info you want? I'd like more info, too, but I'm OK with just leaving the comment as it is instead of throwing a polemic fit over it.

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