The Theory of Gut Bacteria Value

&quot;After the decline of traditional faith, the ensuing churn of political religions makes me believe that total religiosity is largely conserved; we’ve just been shuffling it around between better or worse vessels.&quot;<p>The conservation of religiosity makes a lot of sense. Religious behavior keeps re-emerging because it isn&#x27;t something done to us, imposed from outside, but because it is somehow produced by our own psycho-biology.<p>That&#x27;s something of an argument for secular organizations to adapt the trappings and ceremonies of religions, to make themselves more sustainable by satisfying those inherent cravings. The military seems to have discovered this.<p>This is my perspective as a life-long atheist, trying to understand the behavior of normal humans. But it may be like a color blind person trying to understand the reaction to a vibrant painting. Maybe I just lack the sense to detect the external religiosity beamed to me by an omnipresent deity.

Fecal transplants have proven effective for treating a range of diseases, so this cannot be true. That we do not yet understand what is going on does not mean there is nothing going on.

A good and pretty entertaining book [1] &#x2F; video [2] is made by Giulia Enders. I did just watched, read the German version.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darm-mit-charme.de&#x2F;buch.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darm-mit-charme.de&#x2F;buch.html</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ODJwP8C48cE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ODJwP8C48cE</a>

&gt; What do gut bacteria do again? ...<p>&gt; Well, I’m here to tell you that they do nothing.<p>Utter tripe. After getting a cardiac stent placed last April, I did a deep dive on cardiovascular disease. I landed on work from the Cleveland Clinic by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. In his long-term studies, he finds that bacteria in the gut metabolize certain proteins found in meat and dairy into trimethethylamine, which the liver metabolizes into trimethylamine-oxide (TMAO). TMAO annihilates the nitric oxide blood gas created by the endothelium to protect and repair itself. In other words, that is the root cause of CVD.<p>That, my friends, is not nothing.<p>The author of this piece claiming that gut bacteria have no impact on the body&#x27;s biochemistry is being willfully ignorant of years of well-established studies. At the very least, for the one, narrow interest where I have done a deep dive.

TLDR: It hypothesizes that gut bacteria &quot;do nothing&quot; other than crowd out bad bacteria, which is extremely valuable in its own right.<p>It&#x27;s a good read about a valuable concept, never mind that I don&#x27;t agree on the basic premise that gut bacteria &quot;do nothing.&quot;

I cannot help being underwhelmed by papers on the so-called &#x27;microbiome.&#x27; Very seldom is it something more complex than proportion&#x2F;prevalence of species X correlates with behavior&#x2F;health outcome Y. Simple correlations with all sorts of imaginable confounding variables that preclude causal explanations. Even in totally hypothesis-free, exploratory studies, almost all variation in species density over time gets explained by two or three PCA components, and gut bacterial populations seem to grow&#x2F;shrink independently with respect to other populations. These dynamics, whatever they may be, are a far cry from such a lofty, puffed-up term like micro-&#x27;biome&#x27;, where its use always signifies complex (and conveniently uncharacterized!) dynamics of bacterial species interacting with each other and the host.<p>That said, I don&#x27;t find the author&#x27;s framing of this particularly useful. If a theory is wrong, it will be wrong for factual, technical reasons. The extent to which some real phenomena can predict others is testable. Handwaving it away as social contagion, ideology, or mass hysteria --- not that those don&#x27;t exist, medieval dance fever being my favorite example --- isn&#x27;t good enough for me.

A compelling introduction but not really sure how the connections are made.<p>Comparing the general value of more things in an ecosystem representing passive or neutral characteristics as a net positive.<p>I think the other examples are different given the “addition by subtraction” of these things improving with the natural evolution &#x2F; diminishing effect of them.

This was a strange article. It seemed to rant about various topics, starting with Gut Bacteria and ending with religion

Should probably be titled &quot;the value of placebos&quot;. Comparing gut bacteria (without a good mix of which which we would be pretty ill) with homeopathy is like comparing oranges with, well, homeopathy.

This is a strange article that has no real sources, makes a broad conjecture about an entire field of research, then goes into tangents about homeopathy, Tik Tok, and religion.<p>And yet somehow, it feels par for the course when it comes to pop-science microbiome discussion. The entire field of microbiome research has been greatly overhyped despite very mixed and lackluster results in studies. You can go out and find individual studies claiming that certain gut bacteria are associated with certain conditions or that certain probiotics are associated with certain outcomes, but it’s much harder to find those results replicated again or even proven out in the real world, with a few minor exceptions.<p>Meanwhile, the more philosophically minded writers have latched on to all of this uncertainty and ambiguity as an opening to inject their own pet theories or hypothesize that various disease stages are related to something vague with the microbiome. It’s reminiscent of how misunderstandings of quantum physics are often used to justify quack theories because the reader may not know how to separate quantum physics fact from fiction.<p>I’m still optimistic that some value will come from microbiome research, but it’s not going to come from wandering blog posts like this.