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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

> For the first time, researchers have found that Alzheimer’s symptoms can be transferred to a healthy young organism via the gut microbiota, confirming its role in the disease.

I just read “I Contain Multitudes” by Ed Yong where this topic was unsure as there’s only a handful confirmed links to things like depression, obesity, etc. Now it is confirmed for Alzheimer’s. This is extraordinary.

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It's an interesting avenue, though a problem is that updates and interviews with Ed Yong post book appear to show they could only treat one thing - c diff effectively with fecal transplants and that is apparently temporary, with recent studies show it lasting possibly a year before another transplant is necessary, and that probiotics via food like yogurt/kefir cultures only last as long as you eat the food regularly, there is no way (yet) to permanently fix a broken (as in the same as someone who had regular, non highly processed diet for baseline versus people who had switched from their pre highly processed diet to the highly processed modern diet) microbiome. Here's his Fresh Air interview, https://www.npr.org/2016/08/18/490432969/eating-yogurt-is-no... but he's written a lot of stuff since then, too, for the Atlantic.

Great interview! This summarizes the book well:

> The microbiome is not a panacea for our health problems. It doesn't explain them all in their entirety. I think it just shows how important microbes are in our lives and what a strong influence they have.

I'm optimistic. With the current AI wave and being able to process datasets once impossible to do, we can at least come up with findings (that we may not understand) but may help us to understand these diseases and life conditions through the lens of trillions of microbes.

I know nothing about this but to me „highly processed“ seems like such a broad term that it seems unlikely that every form of processing is bad. Would be great if we could instead enumerated the handful worst offenders which would make it easier for people to see the causal relationship and adapt their behavior in a more fine-grained way

There are a lot of different studies and my comment was pretty short, but this is an explanation and evaluation of the generally used system for classifying food into ultra high processed versus not. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 Most studies involving human diet involve self reporting so that's why its important to understand the limitations of that classification system.

There have been lots of studies showing a connection with microbiome changes, though some countries have been later than the USA in adopting more ultra high processed foods, allowing a more timely study, here is one about Spanish citizens and tried to guide the self reporting diet a bit more specifically about where to categorize their food intake. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8398738/

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