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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

Here’s what may be a more charitable interpretation:

A prevalent layman’s myth is that the bacteria in our gut outnumber our human cells by a wide margin (the article quotes the myth as 10:1). That’s a striking figure to a layman and “only” an order of magnitude off from what they claim is the true 1:1 ratio.

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I think it's unfair to characterize this as a layman's myth given that it was a widely quoted figure in the literature at least until 2016.

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(16)00053-2.pdf (Are We Really Vastly Outnumbered? Revisiting the Ratio of Bacterial to Host Cells in Humans)

I guess I could have made it clearer with better wording. I didn’t mean layman’s myth as in “originated by layman” or “only quoted by laymen” but rather “commonly known to layman”.

The intent was to distinguish it from other myths in the article that are probably only known to experts. E.g., I don’t think you’ll find many layman quoting a myth about firmicutes:Bacteroidetes ratios.

I can't say I've ever considered the ratio of gut bacteria to human cells in my life. I find it difficult to imagine this consideration is itself very prevalent outside of people who are particularly neurotic about gut bacteria.

I’m certainly a layman on this topic and have heard this quoted often in lay forums like podcasts, and have even said similar myself.

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