
Is Gut Science Biased? - tokenadult
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gut-week-global-guts-western-bias/
======
jerf
It could even be the case... and bear with me here because this is a
_shocking_ idea... it could even by the case that things that are _not_
necessarily reasons to self-flaggelate are involved too. It surely could be
that we don't exercise enough and we are all fat flabbly slobs who need to be
beaten until we are good little boys and girls, but it could _also_ be that we
have legitimate genetic differences and for all we know our Western ancestors
from a thousand years ago would also have had a quite different gut biome than
the people isolated in Asia. It could be that we eat starchy processed crappy
crap and should apologize repeatedly to ourselves until we stop whipping
ourselves which we shouldn't ever do, but it could _also_ be that even a
healthy Western diet still involves substantially different fruits,
vegetables, leafs, meats, etc. from other diets what with being over 10,000
miles away and in radically different ecosystems even when they were totally
wild.

Maybe if we want to do real science and not just find exactly and only what we
were looking for, as we go into this new domain that is basically entirely
unexplored, we should try to do so with open eyes instead of decades-old
preconceptions.

Or it could just be that we're bad, bad people and should feel bad.

(Sorry. Well, sorry-ish. This unrelenting stream of "You Suck And Everything
About You Is Wrong And We're Going To Mention It At Every Opportunity" in the
news is really getting on my nerves after 30+ years of it.)

~~~
vonmoltke
> Or it could just be that we're bad, bad people and should feel bad.

Why is there always a value judgment assumed? Why are you creating a false
dichotomy between "it's out of my control" and "I'm a bad person"?

~~~
jerf
If I were the one "creating" this, why would I be "tired" of it? All I'd have
to do to stop it would be to just... stop it. But it's not me.

Perhaps you're simply not as sensitized to it as me, since it is becoming
rather a raw spot with me. Go back and read the article again, carefully. Note
how all the explanations of difference are assumed to be essentially moral
failings of westerners, to eat "properly" [1] or exercise. Note the ingrained
assumption that if there's a difference between the isolated primitive and the
Westerner, the Westerner is automatically in the wrong, be it in behaviors or
gut biomes, which they actually have to remind themselves may not be true,
though they don't actually come up with any other possible explanations.

Mind you, I don't disagree that there are dietary issues in the Western diet
or that there are exercise issues, but it's still _bad science_ to presume in
advance those are the only explanations to be considered, be it explicitly
assumed or implicitly assumed. There's a world of variables out there and
we've barely _begun_ to shine a light.

[1]: Can't resist scare quoting since a lot of the people telling us what is
"proper" in the past 40-50 years have also been _dead wrong_ and quite
possibly the dominant reason we're eating wrong in the first place; if not the
dominant reason then certainly a _huge_ one.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
I just read the article, carefully, with your alleged claims in mind. I have
no idea how you drew these conclusions about moral failings and such. They
seem to go beyond reaching into the realm of imagining things that aren't even
hinted at.

~~~
halviti
I have no idea how he came up with his rant either. The article says little to
nothing along the lines of what he claims.

Only at the end of the article, someone else other than the author is quoted
as saying that negative health outcomes can't be blamed on just your gut
biome, but poor lifestyle choices as well.

Somehow this guy took this one statement, which is wholly correct and only
points out the obvious, and turned it around to interpret the entire article
as fat-shaming, and somehow misses the article's main purpose which is the
lack of diversity in current data comparisons in this area of research.

------
taeric
This reads like an overly cynical view of early stage experimentation. Will
there be a lot of data that has to be simplified and ignored? Of course. That
is almost by definition why we look at Calories and other proxy measures.

This will not become a science when someone perfects the one experiment that
can answer questions. It becomes a science when people ask questions that they
can falsify in ways that other people can replicate. It continues to be a
science as long as that is the case.

Edit: I should point out that I misread the headline. I thought it was "Is Gut
Science Based?" Not "Biased." .... so, I definitely had a more slanted reading
of the article as I was going.

------
bitwize
An example of this in action: Japanese people have bacteria in their guts
which aid in the breakdown of the cellulose-rich nori in their diet -- which
probably at least partially explains why if you're a Westerner unacclimated to
Japanese cuisine and you go to a sushi bar, you may end up with a case of the
sushits. But this was only discovered _recently_ \-- like a few years ago --
it never occurring to people before then that gut microbiomes could be so
diverse as to have developed local variants to handle local cuisine. But there
you go.

------
entee
The idea that Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD as stated
in the article) studies are biased is both obvious and not necessarily
entirely problematic. The reasons it's not so bad are 2 fold:

1.) Scientists know this and are aware of the caveats (as the article points
out).

2.) It's likely that for many biochemical/physiological/medical questions the
variation within a reasonably large sample of such a population (male/female,
fit/non-fit, manual labor/office work, vegetarian/meat+potatoes, not to
mention countless biochemical processes...) swamps out the variation among
larger groups.

How many studies fail even with such a homogeneous sample? Tons! My point is
biology is messy enough already, that it's likely we've got bigger problems to
solve than incorporating different standards of living, continents etc.

Now it's true if you want to make broad claims about microbiota, by definition
you have to actually sample much more widely than the WEIRDs. But again, if
you want to make narrow claims about differences between healthy WEIRDs and
non-healthy WEIRDs, maybe not. I'm sure it would help, but that doesn't mean
those studies are useless!

The technologies enabling this kind of work (chiefly next-gen high throughput
DNA/RNA sequencing) are about 10 years old. And they haven't really been in
relatively low barrier to entry use for much longer than 3 or 4. We're
studying a hugely complex system here, and it's the definition of early days.
Bias is important, the article is absolutely correct to point it out, but it's
way too early to make any conclusions one way or the other about what is
important in the microbiome, or the value of the research to date.

The best we can say right now is, "It's probably very important, we don't know
how just yet."

------
skilled
Living in Southeast Asia, and countries like Nepal, that has taught me to
honor my gut, and put inside of it only the things that it feels happy with,
but needless to say, I still had to experience some of the worst shit-storms
(literally) in my life, all because of mixing together bacteria from one food
to the other -- I'm sure they could learn a lot from the Asian people.

Experimenting with probiotics right now, and would love to hear about their
effectiveness in a healthy diet.

~~~
tokenadult
You've heard about the most shocking defecation story related to Nepal,
haven't you? United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal are thought to have
been so lax in digging latrines in their camps that they introduced cholera to
Haiti when stationed there after the earthquake there. Until then, the island
of Haiti had never had a reported case of cholera, but now cholera is endemic
in Haiti.

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14641343)

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2114342...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=211434286)

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2016/04/what_caused_haiti_s_cholera_epidemic_the_cdc_s_museum_knows_but_won_t_say.html)

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omonra
I find it funny that some self-hating SJW came up with the acronym WEIRD to
describe the population of the first world.

Ie it's pretty clear they started out with the acronym and then searched for
the letters to finish it off. Would this sht pass if someone wanted to come up
with an acronym for the illiterate population of the world that subsist on
less than $1 a day and ended up with UGLY (for the sake of example)?

I find it equally unpleasant when people denigrate groups - whether they
perceive them as 'underprivileged' or 'privileged'.

~~~
tashi
1\. Calling someone "weird" seems a lot more playful than insulting to me.

2\. Do you find it equally unpleasant when people make insulting remarks about
their own group than about a group they don't belong to? I think the latter is
usually considered worse.

3\. Speaking of which, "self-hating SJW" is a term used to denigrate a group--
in this case, a group you don't belong to--and to dismiss them as people
without considering the validity of their ideas. That's a cognitive shortcut
that could be harmful.

~~~
omonra
Yes - it may be more 'playful' than insulting. But I definitely sense a
general tone that it's ok to insult white / straight people while prostrating
oneself in front of any kind of ethnic or sexual minority. This is a perfect
example of this.

Is there any purpose to calling members of the developed world 'weird'? To me
it's pure propagation of 'victimhood' culture - where being not white or not
straight gives one 'victim points'.

I consider this racist and I'm calling it out.

