
The Measured Man - harscoat
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/the-measured-man/309018/
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patdennis
I'll accept that there's a lot to be learned from stool, but I don't think
this explanation has much to do with it:

 _“Have you ever figured how information-rich your stool is?,” Larry asks me
with a wide smile, his gray-green eyes intent behind rimless glasses. “There
are about 100 billion bacteria per gram. Each bacterium has DNA whose length
is typically one to 10 megabases—call it 1 million bytes of information. This
means human stool has a data capacity of 100,000 terabytes of information
stored per gram. That’s many orders of magnitude more information density
than, say, in a chip in your smartphone or your personal computer. So your
stool is far more interesting than a computer.”_

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jerrya
Have you ever considered which represents a higher bandrate, Internet 2 or a
747-8 filled with your poop flying to Australia?

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ricardobeat
We read that article too :)

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SoftwareMaven
Small, implanted labs-on-a-chip will eventually solve the data gathering
problem. Software and lots of data (both your own and others suitably like
you, where suitably is a thousands of times more specific than it is today)
will identify the difference that are "normal" versus those that are
"unhealthy".

This will upend the medical industry, which is one of the most inertial
industries in existence. Worse, all the regulations that protect us will
ultimately be used to protect it, in far worse ways than the whole RIAA/MPAA
thing.

I hope technology can beat it.

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kiba
Hey! I have crohn's disease too. The way I discovered I had the disease, too
late, was when my digestive tract starts to bleed blood. Ulcer was on a blood
vessel.

I knew nothing about my body(and still don't) other than I am obese, need
exercise, and my guts is in terrible shape. I hope this article, and others
like it, will help jumpstart effort to measure my own body for science.

~~~
lukifer
I'm surprised that there was no mention of gluten sensitivity and/or gut
permeability as possible causes of chronic inflammation. While mainstream
medicine is still not sold on the idea, I think the widespread anecdotal
evidence merits further study and data-gathering. In my own case, I stopped
having chronically inflamed gums when I gave up grains.

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wangarific
While this is to the extreme, this level of detail on an annual or 5-year
basis could be useful to identify the delta.

