
Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health - Mz
https://theconversation.com/i-spent-three-days-as-a-hunter-gatherer-to-see-if-it-would-improve-my-gut-health-78773
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onychomys
Although it sounds like an amazing experience, I'm not really sure if we
should be impressed with the results of the experiment. How much of the
increase in floral biodiversity was just from going somewhere far away from
home? That is, if he'd eaten food for three days in Pretoria or Bangalore,
would he have seen the same increase? Or is there something special about a
hunter/gatherer diet?

(...and yeah, for the purposes of this comment, I'm setting aside the n=1
problem. It's not really supposed to be a scientific experiment, obviously,
but the writeup sure sounds like it's supposed to prove a point.)

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netvarun
Of late I have been enthralled by this show called 'Life Below Zero' (It's on
Netflix and I really recommend watching it) - it's a reality TV show which
profiles folks living in the Alaskan Bush. It primarily revolves around 4-5
different folks who live in various extreme remote parts of Alaska.

Reading this article, it really reminded me of one of the lead characters,
Glenn Villeneuve ([http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/life-below-
zero/articl...](http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/life-below-
zero/articles/glenn-villeneuve/)), who lives a very spartan and primitive (by
his own choosing) hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Brooks Range (Chandalar,
AK). He hunts for all his food and just boils them mostly (and often times
eats them raw). He doesn't not use seasoning at all. I am guessing his gut
microbes must be pretty robust and diverse.

Main difference between Hadza and his place is that food sources are very
spread out and thin in Chandalar. Most of the show is just following him
trying to find his food.

[OT: I generally dislike watching reality TV shows (and also TV in general).
But this show has made me change my opinion on reality TV. Or it could just be
because Alaska has a special place in my heart :)]

~~~
pavel_lishin
I really liked _Alone_ , which reminded me a lot of _Survivorman_. The
contestants are dropped off far apart, and told to survive on their own for as
long as they can, while filming themselves.

The amount of effort varied hugely. Some tapped out and left on the very first
night - either due to psychological issues ("oh my GOD there's a bear") or
physical ("hey let's drink some of this stagnant water and throw up all
night"). Some lasted a long while, but seemed to have a very, very hard time
finding enough calories day to day, and at best lived on a feast-and-famine
schedule (with "feast" being maybe a whole fish.)

A few contestants did so well that their biggest problem was finding things to
do to entertain themselves. One completely moved his camp and rebuilt it from
scratch, built himself a boat, and made a guitar. Another one made a variant
on a chess set that allowed him to play a solitaire game for amusement.

And these folks were all separated by less than ten miles.

~~~
ouid
>told to survive on their own for as long as they can

surely this is not the actual time constraint.

~~~
pavel_lishin
It is. The last person to give up wins the cash prize. (Obviously, they're not
told how many people have quit so far; each person, when they're "tapping
out", has no idea whether they've won or not.)

I really recommend the first season; while there's some tropes of "oh my god
what was that noise <cut to commercial>", there's a lot of focus both on the
physical tasks required for survival, and on what the contestants go through,
psychologically.

A lot of parts are very surprisingly funny.

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notadoc
Three days?

Three weeks would be more noteworthy, but really get back to me after three
months or three years.

~~~
onychomys
Three days is a long time to a bacterium. E coli has a generation time of 20
minutes, Staph aureus is about 30. So we're looking at a hundred generations
or so. It's not nothing.

~~~
TheRealPomax
The test is to see the impact on whole system health, which is determined by
the slowest constituent parts, not the fastest.

Certainly, colonic flora has super high generation time, but the health of the
system cannot measurably change over a three day period without changes in
measurements falling well within error tolerance. Even if health did improve,
the time span chosen is not long enough to sufficiently determine correlation,
let alone causation.

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aschearer
Building on this article, for those who are interested in some science on the
subject, what you eat greatly influences your biome. A vegan diet has been
shown to substantially change your flora [1] in as little as a day [2]. I also
found this video on the role of fiber, our gut flora, and our immune system
interesting [3].

[1]:
[http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v66/n1/full/ejcn2011141a....](http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v66/n1/full/ejcn2011141a.html)

[2]:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7484/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7484/full/nature12820.html)

[3]: [http://nutritionfacts.org/video/prebiotics-tending-our-
inner...](http://nutritionfacts.org/video/prebiotics-tending-our-inner-
garden/)

~~~
PerfectElement
> Conclusions: Maintaining a strict vegan or vegetarian diet results in a
> significant shift in the microbiota while total cell numbers remain
> unaltered.

Studies should almost never use the term "vegan diet" to arrive at any
conclusions. A vegan diet can be potato chips and oreos, whole foods high
carb, whole foods high fat, 100% raw, etc. I assume most of them would produce
significantly different results.

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Hydraulix989
Is there any actual science behind this?

~~~
cardiffspaceman
It doesn't answer all the questions I have but I think it is rational.

> _Mounting evidence suggests that the richer and more diverse the community
> of microbes in your gut the lower your risk of disease._

So this is the main law from science pertinent to the article. My impression
is that many people are interested in this law today.

> _What we didn’t know is whether a healthy stable gut microbiome could be
> improved in just a few days._

This is the empirical question that the experiment explores. If the article is
honest, then the reader has some food for thought. Science would be better
served with a better study.

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anesmike
What impressed me was the look of the older males in the pictures ; there was
not much difference in the physical appearance between young and old.

~~~
pavel_lishin
It's hard to come to a conclusion without knowing their actual ages. If their
healthy-looking elders are all of 45, and nobody seems to be much above that,
then an entirely different conclusion could be drawn.

~~~
gmiller123456
There's also very likely selection bias involved. The photographer likely
chose that photo because it was appealing, not to show a representative sample
of the population.

