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Comment by ottah | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand this bizarre obsession with gut flora. We don't know what is normal, what is a beneficial ratio or when a change happens if that is good or bad thing. No one besides the people who study these things should be much attention to gut microbiomes. We just don't have enough information to let this be an influence on decision making.

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Your comment seems a little flippant honestly. I know what "disrupted" is, trust me. I developed a gluten sensitivity about 10 years ago but only figured it out 5 years ago. "Healthy" is "feels healthy" and "doesn't die young", that is pretty simple.

It sounds like you think this is about hypothetical and marginal health benefits but people have very acute and immediate physical (and cognitive) issues because of disrupted gut biome that are objectively improved by cutting out, in particular, gluten. This isn't just some weird obession.

Gluten intolerance is a real thing but I don't think that necessarily means that your gut flora is damaged or whatever. Plenty of people are lactose intolerant, and their gut flora is fine, they're just lactose intolerant.

I don't think you could solve gluten intolerance but just improving your gut microbiome, so they're probably not related.

Why not? A fecal transplant seems to work for C. difficile sufferers.

A fecal transplant definitely doesn't work for celiac disease, which is the only gluten intolerance you have to worry about.

Other gluten intolerance is probably not gluten, gluten is just a close enough proxy. Could be FODMAP + IBS or maybe some other sensitivity.

Why are you narrowly focusing on gluten intolerance when this line of comments appears to be denying whether gut biome is worth caring about due to having impacts on health?

Because the parent used their anecdote of gluten intolerance to explain why caring about the gut microbiome matters. But traditional gluten intolerances are not related to the gut microbiome.

We also don't really understand why things like a FODMAP diet work. It's not that feeding your gut bacteria is bad, it's actually pretty good. But for some people it's bad, and they get symptoms they attribute to gluten intolerance.

Legumes, onions, whole grain etc that are high FODMAP are good for you. Fiber is good for you, it lowers your risk of metabolic diseases and helps your digestion. But, for some people, it's bad for their digestion. That's weird.

So all that is to say that, while gut bacteria matters, it varies person to person and we can't definitely say what food is good for the microbiome and what isn't.

I think the interesting point as evidenced by the fecal transplant therapy is that it's not "the" microbiome, it's "your" microbiome. Maybe some people have bad (C. difficile) or incompatible (various E. coli strains) microbiomes and need a microbiome hard reboot.

> Could be FODMAP + IBS or maybe some other sensitivity.

Seems extremely unlikely. Of someone is eliminating gluten they from their diet they usually aren't also eliminating dairy, legumes, and other high-fodmap foods; gluten-free is restrictive enough already.

The only other sensitivity I could think of in which this makes sense is wheat sensitivity (but not other gluten containing grains which are less common).

We know that it's really important to neurological function, which is enough reason to be careful.

By itself, it's simply an argument that proves too much. Anything you ingest impacts your gut flora. There can be gut microbiome hypos about glyphosate! But you have to actually have them; you can't stop at "it impacts gut flora".

Well, I didn't intend that as a conversation-ender, but it is true. This particular substance inhibits a particular function of certain gut flora that seems important. I think it's safe to call that significant.

What "particular function" is that? If it's "the part that influences neurological function", you don't have a complete argument. If you can't be specific about this, your argument falls apart, because almost everything we eat potentially "inhibits" (or accelerates) different areas of our gut flora.

I'm not trying to make a complete argument, I'm trying to raise a flag. This issue is not well-studied and has very large corporate sponsors who would like to keep selling Roundup-Ready™ crops. One particular measurable function is inhibition of the shikamate pathway in many different bacteria (the majority of the volume of your gut flora is affected).

Here's a decent paper that shows an adverse effect: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10330715/

I understand that this is the realm of crunchy weirdos, but thinking holistically doesn't mean you need to lobotomize yourself.

Here's another paper examining some brain effects of chronic gut inflammation, which could be reasonably inferred as a potential consequence of long-term glyphosate exposure: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10661239/

You haven't raised a flag! You've observed (and cited a paper that shows in mouse models under relatively high human dosages) that glyphosate can impact certain gut bacteria species. That's plausible! But all sorts of things do that, and you haven't presented evidence that connects that to an adverse human health outcome. In particular: you haven't cited a source showing glyphosate is causative of gut inflammation.

"It impacts the gut biome" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for these arguments; if it were, you could knock down all sorts of things, including specific diets (and most abrupt changes in diet).

Call it (pun intended) a smell test. I have cited a study that shows biomarkers of gut inflammation strongly correlated with glyphosate exposure. Perhaps you should have read it.

I have raised a flag. Lowering your exposure to a novel chemical agent that directly impacts a massive and poorly-understood symbiotic system within the body isn't a bad response. Glyphosate exposure certainly isn't beneficial, so I'll treat it like Pascal's wager: avoiding this has more upside than downside.

I obviously did look at the paper. Glyphosate isn't going anywhere, so Pascal's Wager isn't on the table.

You can absolutely avoid glyphosate in your diet. This is obviously some sort of emotional issue for you.

I don't think there's much glyphosate in any of our diets!

“I don’t understand it well enough in my opinion so we shouldn’t care about it”?

I’m pretty sure there’s hundreds of things we rightly understood are detrimental centuries before we knew how it worked. Aka pretty much everything bad before 1900.

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