Diet impacts metabolic disease via gut microbiota alterations

sciencedirect.com

19 points·mlsys_djw··4 comments

"in High-Fat Diet Mice"

Gotta start somewhere. Humans are the worst for diet studies with rampant non compliance.

The chart has an eye popping result, so it definitely seems worth following. The compound is apparently well tolerated.

Such a small fraction of animal studies pan out in the human population that I'm not even certain it's a worthy starting point. When I saw how rarely animal research converges with human outcomes, I became a proponent of adding "in mice" to these titles. Especially since most comments are just reacting to the title and then spin the title to apply to their hobby horse diet and how amazing it is.

"Humans are hard to study, so let's study beings that aren't human to gather evidence that won't translate to humans" doesn't sound like much of a solution.

That is painting with too broad a brush. Some animal studies do tightly mimic human responses (eg CV in dogs). Others significantly less so. For something as foundational as energy balance, I would expect it to be better than other biological pathways. Should we all start mainlining the compound today? No, but this is a data point which can be followed with more study.

Biology is super complex with many non intuitive relationships you can only discover through experimentation. If we can only rely on human trials, expect the pace of biological research to come to a crawl. Nobody likes relying upon animals, but it is that or we give up on ethics and start experimenting on orphans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com