Isn't the idea to give probiotics to people who do not have a healthy gut? Such as someone who had been taking antibiotic for a prolonged period of time? So why did they give the probiotic to 25 healthy individuals?
Also 25 seems like a very small sample.
Edit: it appears they also did a study on 46 people after taking antibiotics but that I still find to be a small sample size.
The research group also looked at the impact of probiotics after a course of antibiotics, which wipe out both good and bad bacteria.
Their trial on 46 people, also in the journal Cell, showed it led to delays in the normal healthy bacteria re-establishing themselves.
Dr Elinav added: "Contrary to the current dogma that probiotics are harmless and benefit everyone, these results reveal a new potential adverse side effect of probiotic use with antibiotics that might even bring long-term consequences."
This type of comment is explicitly mentioned in the Hacker News Guidelines:
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
The comment you are referencing is in accordance with this section of the guidelines.
>>Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
It is ok to point out facts from the article. We just try not to go overboard with it. I know it might seem pedantic, but over time it really does result in a better community.
Gluten free also refers to processing. If something is made in the same facility / alongside a product with gluten it’s a serious problem with people with Celiac.
25 and 46 are plenty large sample sizes for something that should have a large effect. I agree that I've always thought of probiotics only for recovery after antibiotics or stomach illness.
Does this potentially also have consequences for fecal transplants? That has been an upcoming area of research and relies on a similar idea: You can colonise bateria. If they aren't going to stick around via probiotics, they may also not via fecal.
If in half the cases the newly introduced bacteria "lingered" before being expelled then that demonstrates some kind of traction. e.g. You might just need to combine that with a diet that favours the new bacteria you're trying to introduce.
i.e. Some sort of effect in 50% of the cases is better than I expected honestly
I mean maybe, but that's just speculation, and it really doesn't get us anywhere.
The main point of the article is that off the shelf probiotics don't do the wonders they are toted to. You would have to have probiotics tailored to the unique bacterial composition inside of your gut.
> During the probiotics phase participants consumed Supherb Bio-25 bi-daily, which is described by the manufacturer to contain at least 25 billion active bacteria of the following strains: B. bifidum, L. rhamnosus, L. lactis, L. casei, B. breve, S. thermophilus, B. longum sbsp. longum, L. paracasei, L. plantarum and B. longum sbsp. infantis. According to the manufacturer, the pills underwent double coating to ensure their survival under stomach acidity and their proliferation in the intestines. Validation of the aforementioned strains quantity and viability was performed as part of the study.
Yea, I agree. I'd also add that we know so little about the gut biome at this stage that it feels presumptuous to assume that just because the biome looked 'different' afterwards, means that it's a 'bad' outcome. Even among healthy individuals there seems to be a lot of variability in the gut biome, and I'm wary of claims that one is 'good' and the other is 'bad' without more evidence. On the other hand, seems like we can say with a high level of confidence that antibiotics are devastating to bacteria :)
Does anyone believe anything these articles say anymore?
About two weeks ago, two somewhat prominent doctors from Harvard Medical School got into an enormous disagreement over whether or not coconut oil was “healthy” or “killing you”. No one knows anything under the current system.
There is absolutely no way the public can reasonably believe yay or nay on any new thing about healthy living.
There hasn't been any truly new thing in healthy living in decades. Everybody knows they should exercise regularly and eat a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Everything else is purely of academic interest at the moment.
- Don't overeat, especially junk food (we can argue over which foods are good or bad for you, but a lot of our diets consist of things such as potato chips that are obviously bad for you, at least in large quantities)
Yeah, the whole appeal of the supplement industry, exercise infomercial contraptions, and insulin regimens for T2 diabetes is that they don't require lifestyle change which is the whole challenge of being healthy.
There are a few things that have been useful, though I'm not sure if they were recent but considering how we in the US were raised to eat they've helped me quite a bit: the effect of low-carb diet and intermittent fasting on insulin resistance are the two that have helped me recently.
There have been some interesting studies on intermittent fasting. Refined sugar has been identified as a thing to avoid. We have reversed a lot of flawed studies (IE fat is bad).
Well, the issue is that people will buy things like probiotics with the belief that it's helping them, and probiotics being universally healthy is one of the most dogmatic nutrition facts that anyone can recite.
If there is controversy here, then people would likely err better by not buying extra health supplements like probiotics that may be causing harm.
Same with coconut oil. I go out of my way to use it because I heard it was healthy despite it infusing everything I cook with a cheap coconut taste. If there is controversy, then I would just use other oil products.
It's not like it's a debate on which way to spool your toilet roll where inaction is inconsequential.
The only 'controversy' around coconut oil is that it is very high in saturated fat - much more so than lard, beef dripping or even butter.
It doesn't appear to have any mitigating health factors, as had been claimed (a lot, by a lot of people and a lot of the press), that would count against this. So it appears to be a really unhealthy fat, which should be used sparingly.
But it increasingly seems that inaction is inconsequential. The only dietary information I trust is to keep your weight down. Being overweight puts extra strain on joints, ligaments, as well as internal organs. Everything else just seems like the fad dujour.
Right, what I meant is that you aren't taking the "eh, this is too controversial to make a decisive health decision" route when you're still going out of your way to consume things you otherwise wouldn't.
The parent post seemed to dismiss things as controversial, so I suggest that you can indeed take action on controversy: avoid buying those supplements.
I heard Coconut Oil was in secret negotiations to develop Half-Life 3. In all seriousness, everyone's always looking for an easy, digestible answer, whether that be diet, politics, or information. This is why engineers and experts who understand the incredible complexities of an issue tend to make poor salespeople, when you know all the edge cases it can be hard to give a simple answer because most people are inherently good and honest. The best sales and support people tend to be those that can distill complex concepts down to meaningful summaries without losing important information.
This is so true. I used to be consume articles about healthy eating, but it after all the contradiction I have decided that I'm done reading about it all. I keep it simple with the opinion that eating protein, your veggies and drinking water will be near optimal for most humans, and anything after is just not worth the effort to optimize. 80/20, people.
Reading the latest research on healthy eating isn't a path to health -- especially if the research hasn't been replicated. It's just a news article on preliminary research. Why be upset about that?
Because regular people read this bullshit uncritically, journalists write more pop articles based on that, which makes more people read it... and suddenly your mother starts calling you about pills you should/should not be taking, and your SO starts to insist on random dietary changes.
Even if this stuff doesn't cause huge hurt, it definitely causes annoyance.
The vast vast vast majority of people drink way too little water. I drink a little over a gallon a day in addition to the occasional coffee or soda and still occasionally feel the effects of dehydration. I know people who may only have 2-3 glasses of water in a day and nothing else. It's crazy they're still alive.
Totally agree. I've heard the simplest "test" is to look at your pee color. It should be very light yellow. If it's clear, you're probably overdoing it.
We have genes that help regulate the use of water in our system. These genes can turn on and off depending on our environment and the availability of water. If you feel the urge to drink over a gallon of water, more power to you, but most of us really don't need that much water. Also, if your pee is consistently clear, you're probably drinking way more water than your system needs.
You may also need to consume more salt and glucose so your body retains more of the water you're consuming. Due to osmotic pressure, your cells can't actually absorb water without the correct salt and glucose to help act as a transport.
My impression is that you have to be running a major caloric deficit to worry about protein sufficiency (barring an incredibly strange diet), so you may be able to simplify your dietary guidelines even further.
ETA: e.g. brown rice, russet potatoes, and whole wheat bread all have approx the same %DV of protein as they do calories.
I believe that from the minimal perspective, you are right. I actively lift weights/run though so I try to hit around .75-1g/lb daily for recovery (and vanity) purposes.
I've generally found Michael Pollan's advice to be a good rule of thumb: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Assuming anything more narrow runs the risk of being speculation.
You could say the same thing about any discipline where professionals have opposing viewpoints. It's nothing new that there is disagreement within a discipline. Some of the topics that people are complaining about are very new. So of course there are going to be contradictory findings before it is settled.
It's important to use accepted science like Cochrane collab.
"You could say the same thing about any discipline where professionals have opposing viewpoints. "
I guess the problem in nutrition is that it impacts everybody's daily decisions. It doesn't make much difference to me if string theory or super symmetry works but it makes a difference to know whether I should avoid coconut oil or not.
If someone wants to experiment and be on the cutting edge they can follow the latest news stories. The stakes really aren't that high for most people. Those who follow the standard dietary advice can live a full life.
Sometimes theoretical physics makes a big difference in our daily lives too. For example if we live in a multiverse (quantum many worlds or inflationary) and if that implies immortality.
Tell that to... well, vast majority of people. Problem with dietary studies isn't internal disagreement - it's that every iteration gets published in pop press as if it was scientific consensus, creating fads readily exploited by marketers. It's a shitshow.
Citation? The pro-coconut oil camp seems to be mostly based on traditional medicine claims. The science seems pretty uniformly opposed. Every study yields fresh data but it usually takes many years and a longitudinal study to get confident conclusions.
Do you mind sharing? When I skimmed the Harvard article my take away was just that lots of fat is bad for you (duh), but there was nothing innately bad about coconut oil. Just don't delude oneself into thinking fat from coconut oil is healthy.
Scientists think they cause cardiovascular disease:
There are strong, consistent, and graded relationships between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol levels, and the mass occurrence of cardiovascular disease.[5] The relationships are accepted as causal.[24][25]
I think the failure is in presuming that the number of double bonds in the carbon chains of the fatty acids is the dominant factor, when clearly overall chain length and the position and orientation of the double-bonds are also significant factors.
Researcher says: "saturated fat is bad for you."
I ask: "Is laurin (tri-lauric acid homoglyceride) worse or better than stearin? When lipases release the fatty acids, is free lauric acid worse or better than free stearic acid? Do acetic acid and formic acid count as saturated fats in your analysis? Is there a significant metabolic difference between eating fats as mono-, di-, or triglycerides, or as non-esterified fatty acids? Does the comparison with unsaturated fats change if the fats in question are exposed to heat and oxygen prior to consumption?"
Chemically, those fats are all different. Metabolically, many of them are transformed via catalytic proteins into different chemicals, with certain steps being rate-limited, or resource-competitive with other steps.
But it appears as though no one really knows all that much about fat, other than you need to eat a certain quantity of fatty acids with one double bond three carbons from the terminal end (omega-3) because the human body cannot produce those by itself, and they are required for certain hormones and structures.
As far as I know, coconut oil, when compared to most other common vegetable oils, has a higher fraction of saturated fatty acids in it, but those fatty acids are also significantly shorter than the fatty acids typically found in animal fats and other vegetable oils. They are different fats, and a human body digests them differently. Do they follow different metabolic chains to achieve the same result, or do they produce different results? I don't know. No research I have seen has delved that deeply into those properties of dietary fats.
the issue is rather the quality of the articles and what we as humans in general prefer to read. we'd rather read about an extreme (this is the greatest, this is the worst) or a conflict (person a says the opposite to person b). it's basically just a symptom of decaying journalistic standards. incidentally it's often also cheaper to produce such content.
there is probably an academic consensus that goes one way or the other, but our journalism has decayed enough that they don't even bother researching this.
Sums up my feelings. At this point, I firmly believe that the negative physiological consequences from the stress about nutrition outweigh any benefits.
Eat intelligently (I think we can agree that processed foods and sugar is less good than fresh veggies), and lower the stress.
For all the back and forth there are some things we do know. Get your macro- and micronutrients. Don't eat too many toxins and heavy metals. Too much sugar is bad.
You'll probably be mostly fine whether you eat coconut oil or not, as long as the quantities are not completely unreasonable.
Most commonly they're the defense chemicals employed by plants to discourage animals from eating them, like saponins or tannins. Sometimes they're the chemicals sprayed on plants by humans to discourage non-human animals from eating them, or non-edible plants from competing for resources. It might just be a chemical vital to the organism that coincidentially interferes with digestion of essential nutrients for other organisms, like phytic acid or oxalic acid. They might even be like capsaicin, to discourage one type of animal from eating a fruit (mammals), while a more preferred animal is completely unaffected (birds).
Cassava, better known in the US as the source material for tapioca, contains chemicals that can easily decompose into poisonous HCN. If you crush the cassava, as when biting it raw, the decomposition enzyme mixes with the chemicals and produces poison. If you leach and ferment the root in water, the toxins are removed. If you grind the root into paste and let the HCN escape into the atmosphere, the toxins are removed. Without those toxins, the food is safe[r] to eat.
Food is made of a lot of different chemicals, and digestion encompasses a lot of different catalyzed chemical reactions. Some chemicals will slow down, speed up, prevent, or enable reactions between other chemicals.
A lot of that just gets oversimplified to "toxin" because the information has to be understandable to people who don't have a doctorate-level education in biochemistry. Because of that oversimplification, scammers can exploit the intentional vagueness and ambiguity to turn fear into money. In that case, the "toxins" are just bullshit designed to scare you into buying stuff. The easiest way to distinguish between fact and FUD is by asking the claimant to name the toxin. If they can say "cyanogenic glucosides produce cyanide poisons on maceration that interfere with the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood" it's probably a real thing. If they say "big agri-corporations spray them on all the food to keep us unhealthy, fat, and depressed" it's probably bullshit.
Agreed, it's sensationalism, both the writer and the conductor of the study.
My experience in academia is that researchers rely heavily on controversy and drama to further their studies. It's part of the game they have to play to continue to receive funding or gain attention in the public eye.
The author of the paper seems like he's marketing a problem that he'll try to solve in the coming years, by building a company that offers bespoke probiotic solutions based on analysis of an individual customer's microbiome. Not a bad business model honestly, it's spreadshirt for your gut.
If you have a specific diagnosis, an awesome bullshit detector and hang out in the right circles, it is possible to make some sense of things and make informed choices that make a meaningful difference in your life.
It's only nigh useless if you are some "standard issue normal human with no alterations (aka health issues)" and want generic advice about what works for everyone all the time. Then it's pretty eye-roll worthy, for what I feel are kind of obvious reasons.
>There is absolutely no way the public can reasonably believe yay or nay on any new thing about healthy living.
There is nothing new about healthy living.
Eat plants. Drink water. Sleep well.
Don't add salt to anything. Avoid sugar. Eat meat only in moderation.
Fiber from beans makes you poo good.
Coffee and alcohol in moderation is alright. Drinking to the point of visible external intoxication is not "in moderation".
Exercise, even if only a walk in the evening.
If you are overweight, eat fewer calories each day than your body needs to function. If you are underweight, eat more calories each day than your body needs to function.
None of that sells books, or drives eyeballs to the latest ad-infested "Doctors say x will kill ya!" article.
This is a good guideline for people who are on a sad diet and get plenty of sodium from processed foods and meats, but someone following the other guidelines you list and not salting anything is likely to be more at risk of low sodium than high, depending on their personal risk factors (HBP and genetic history).
(assuming the reason "avoid overly processed foods" isn't listed is that it goes without saying)
I followed the low sodium bullshit for more than a decade and never put two and two together: that what was making me debilitatingly drowsy on rest days after multiple days of vigorous exercise was the lack of sodium.
Almost exactly year ago I started adding salt to everything. Not only did the drowsiness go away, I haven't had single muscle cramp in the twelve months since.
I can see some problems with your diet, such as it does nothing to prevent iodine deficiency, since you don't eat (iodized) salt, drink only water and basically don't eat anything containing iodine.
The general public can rest relatively assured that, when there is a broad consensus on some subject, with numerous studies published over the years repeatedly finding similar results, it's a good idea to follow the scientific advice (that typically follows the consensus).
For example, in what regards coconut oil, it's far from just two doctors from Harvard recently saying that coconut oil is bad for you. From the wikipedia page on the vegetable fat:
Due to its high levels of saturated fat, the World Health Organization, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, United States Food and Drug Administration, American Heart Association, American Dietetic Association, British National Health Service, British Nutrition Foundation, and Dietitians of Canada advise that coconut oil consumption should be limited or avoided.
The same goes for various allegedly "controversial" subjects like saturated fat and heart disease, sugar, salt, etc. You can typically find advice by multiple public health organisations and multiple studies reporting findings very similar to each other, stretching back decades. Just because then a new study comes out that bucks the trend, which is immediately widely reported in the popular news as a "groundbreaking new study", or because someone (often, not an expert) writes a book that tells "the truth" about the subject, is no reason to get confused.
In science always follows the consensus, as in business always follow the money.
Well of course results vary from paper to paper. I'm sure we all know that science progresses as general consensus. It's important to follow larger trends, not the day to day experiments.
Probiotics always struck me as one of those pills that mother gives you that don't do anything at all.
These products were developed commercially based on what they could make and not on any analysis of what a person's intestinal flora should be, nor any proof that the deliver system worked.
One of those cases where the patent model works is the development of prescription drugs. The possibility of monopoly profits leads pharma companies to develop and test drugs and run them through a regulatory gauntlet. Critics say it is expensive, but it does work in the sense that new drugs get invented and some of them really are a boon.
For something like fish oil you can do the research but it benefits everybody else who sells fish oil, which, oddly enough, lowers my blood triglycerides like a drug although having put up no real benefits other than that for years.
> "The research group also looked at the impact of probiotics after a course of antibiotics, which wipe out both good and bad bacteria.
Their trial on 46 people, also in the journal Cell, showed it led to delays in the normal healthy bacteria re-establishing themselves.
Dr Elinav added: "Contrary to the current dogma that probiotics are harmless and benefit everyone, these results reveal a new potential adverse side effect of probiotic use with antibiotics that might even bring long-term consequences."
If you only read the first few paragraphs (where they discussed the effect of probiotics on healthy people) you might have missed this important piece of information.
This discovery is hardly surprising. Probiotics aren't regulated by the FDA as drugs, but rather as "food supplements", which basically means they have the same standard of regulation as regular food [1].
[1] To be sold as a drug (i.e. pharmaceutical) a product must undergo rigorous trials to show efficacy and find any unintended side effects. Clinical trials typically cost around $60-80 million, which is part of the reason drugs are so expensive.
One of my friends who has severe dietary/gut problems did several isolated experiments on himself with different probiotics and found success from very specific ones like PHGG and GOS..
It may also depends on how you get them. For example somebody told me that turmeric helps with joint inflammation. Bought some turmeric capsules and they did nothing. But then I used it in cooking and it definitely makes a difference for my joint pain. It comes back while traveling and I don't get turmeric. But as soon as I get home and eat my own food the joint pain gets better. It also gets worse when I stop using turmeric in my own cooking for a while.
That's very interesting, is your joint pain from arthritis, injury, or something else? Does anything other than turmeric help? Does your OTC pain reliever of choice like advil/aleve/tylenol help?
Did the supplement contain pepper? AFAIK you need to consume turmeric together with black pepper to make it effective (blocks something in the liver IIRC). Maybe that was the reason?
Looked at a actimel (https://www.actimel.co.uk/faq_about) and yakult (https://www.yakult.co.uk/) and was surprised by how little they attribute to the "good bacteria". Yakult promises that: is scientifically proven to reach the gut alive (!)
From the days I was a teenager and we had TV at home in Poland, I remember the brand "Actimel" being all about "good bacteria". So this must have changed recently. My guess is, the EU told them to stop spewing bullshit in commercials.
This is from yakult us, boy this is underwhelming: Because everyone's biological make-up is unique, each one of us may experience our own unique health benefits Generally speaking, Yakult may help balance your digestive system.
I'm pretty sure it's solid science that probiotics definitely help at treating or preventing certain digestive tract disorders/diseases. For instance, SIBO:
But, I don't feel that the second is a legitimate use of meta-analyses. Due to publication bias, the conclusions it draws are only useful if the efficacy of probiotics is a forgone conclusion.
Moreover: I have a huge question regarding their primary measure, specifically regarding their use of number from this study:
It doesn't seem very surprising that if you keep eating mostly what you normally eat, your microbiome is already well-adapted to that diet and will out compete almost anything new you try to introduce.
I would expect if they tried limiting their diet to foods compatible with the probiotics, they'd get more significant results, because the existing microbiome colonies would be stressed from lack of their usual junk/meat/fat and be weaker. (Almost all standard probiotics, other than dairy varieties [yogurt etc], are veg-carb-loving.)
Before refrigeration, there couldn't have been many probiotics consumed in isolated form rather than as fermented foods. Give the new bacteria some food to eat when they're trying to out-compete your existing (bad parts of your) gut microbiome. One of the most likely good foods for them to eat is what they've been cultured on.
It may not even be necessary to eat probiotics, if you already have some of the bacteria you want, you merely need to encourage it to out-compete bad microbiome bacterial strains. Eat food compatible with the good bacteria.
But it's such a hassle to change diets, everyone wants a pill or a powder or one serving of probiotics they can add to their diet, keep everything else the same, and have the bad bacteria / imbalance miraculously disappear. Is it any surprise that's less likely to work?
Probiotics used incorrectly can have mixed results; and thus, there will be endless religious debates on the matter.
If the reason you are taking them is to cull dangerous bacteria such as H.pylori, you would first have to bring their numbers down to a point where the probiotics have a fighting chance. This is typically either done with anti-biotics, or a combination of supplements such as aged garlic, mastic gum, coconut oil, etc... to first kill things off. Then after taking the probiotics, the candida overgrowth has to be purged with garlic extract. Very few people will take the time to go through the right steps throughout the days/weeks required to balance things out. This lends itself to a wide variability in results.
H. pylori isn't a yeast? Or did you mean that the probiotics would include yeasts (possible, certainly, like S. boulardii, but it dies off by itself pretty quickly). Though of course the process you describe is similar to what anyone taking a course of antibiotics to treat an illness could do, I was hospitalized after being hit by truck and given lots of kefir along with my antibiotics.
H.pylori is a bacteria. When you add bacteria in large amounts to compensate, they will cause candida overgrowth which is a fungus. The fungus has to be killed off.
It's funny that this research claims is spin to prove that supermarket probiotics are useless, but instead of broadly testing actual supermarket probiotics products, or even testing a single such product, it tests a single specific custom blend product created by the research team.
At best, they've shown that blend to be quite useless as tested.
Seems like a pointless study if you're only sampling people who are already healthy. "Probiotics don't do anything if you already have a healthy gut." Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.
The main purpose of probiotics I've heard of is to repopulate a gut that's been wiped out by antibiotics. This experiment was performed on 25 healthy subjects; its results don't seem to bear on that purpose.
133 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadAlso 25 seems like a very small sample.
Edit: it appears they also did a study on 46 people after taking antibiotics but that I still find to be a small sample size.
---
The research group also looked at the impact of probiotics after a course of antibiotics, which wipe out both good and bad bacteria.
Their trial on 46 people, also in the journal Cell, showed it led to delays in the normal healthy bacteria re-establishing themselves.
Dr Elinav added: "Contrary to the current dogma that probiotics are harmless and benefit everyone, these results reveal a new potential adverse side effect of probiotic use with antibiotics that might even bring long-term consequences."
---
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>>Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
It is ok to point out facts from the article. We just try not to go overboard with it. I know it might seem pedantic, but over time it really does result in a better community.
Last week I accidentally bought a bottle of water from seven eleven,which turned out to have probiotics added. Cost the same as regular water too...
Like how a lot of things became "gluten free" despite not containing gluten to begin with.
As the article states - "The researchers said probiotics of the future would need tailoring to the needs of each individual."
If in half the cases the newly introduced bacteria "lingered" before being expelled then that demonstrates some kind of traction. e.g. You might just need to combine that with a diet that favours the new bacteria you're trying to introduce.
i.e. Some sort of effect in 50% of the cases is better than I expected honestly
The main point of the article is that off the shelf probiotics don't do the wonders they are toted to. You would have to have probiotics tailored to the unique bacterial composition inside of your gut.
That's the main claim.
OTOH, they didn't test any off-the-shelf probiotic products in isolation, they tested their own custom probiotic mix.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31102-4?_re...
About two weeks ago, two somewhat prominent doctors from Harvard Medical School got into an enormous disagreement over whether or not coconut oil was “healthy” or “killing you”. No one knows anything under the current system.
There is absolutely no way the public can reasonably believe yay or nay on any new thing about healthy living.
Everything else is purely of academic interest at the moment.
- Exercise regularly
- Eat a variety of fruits and veggies
- Don't overeat, especially junk food (we can argue over which foods are good or bad for you, but a lot of our diets consist of things such as potato chips that are obviously bad for you, at least in large quantities)
- Stay hydrated
- Don't be too stressed
If there is controversy here, then people would likely err better by not buying extra health supplements like probiotics that may be causing harm.
Same with coconut oil. I go out of my way to use it because I heard it was healthy despite it infusing everything I cook with a cheap coconut taste. If there is controversy, then I would just use other oil products.
It's not like it's a debate on which way to spool your toilet roll where inaction is inconsequential.
It doesn't appear to have any mitigating health factors, as had been claimed (a lot, by a lot of people and a lot of the press), that would count against this. So it appears to be a really unhealthy fat, which should be used sparingly.
The parent post seemed to dismiss things as controversial, so I suggest that you can indeed take action on controversy: avoid buying those supplements.
Considering that probiotics are formally defined as having a beneficial effect when ingested, there is good reason for this to be "dogmatic".
The question then would be "what's a probiotic and what isn't?"
Even if this stuff doesn't cause huge hurt, it definitely causes annoyance.
I've concluded that eating is good for your health.
[citation needed]
Jokes aside, you and GP are right; with this level of confusion, there's not much ground for trying to micromanage your diet.
I've seen lots of articles on this too.
The only thing that sucks, is getting up to pee every 30 to 60 minutes is kind of disruptive to coding in the zone :-)
128+ oz today is a ludicrously high consumption if you aren't working outside in the sun all day long or running a marathon or something.
You may also need to consume more salt and glucose so your body retains more of the water you're consuming. Due to osmotic pressure, your cells can't actually absorb water without the correct salt and glucose to help act as a transport.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11193601
My impression is that you have to be running a major caloric deficit to worry about protein sufficiency (barring an incredibly strange diet), so you may be able to simplify your dietary guidelines even further.
ETA: e.g. brown rice, russet potatoes, and whole wheat bread all have approx the same %DV of protein as they do calories.
It's important to use accepted science like Cochrane collab.
https://us.cochrane.org/
I guess the problem in nutrition is that it impacts everybody's daily decisions. It doesn't make much difference to me if string theory or super symmetry works but it makes a difference to know whether I should avoid coconut oil or not.
There are strong, consistent, and graded relationships between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol levels, and the mass occurrence of cardiovascular disease.[5] The relationships are accepted as causal.[24][25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...
Researcher says: "saturated fat is bad for you."
I ask: "Is laurin (tri-lauric acid homoglyceride) worse or better than stearin? When lipases release the fatty acids, is free lauric acid worse or better than free stearic acid? Do acetic acid and formic acid count as saturated fats in your analysis? Is there a significant metabolic difference between eating fats as mono-, di-, or triglycerides, or as non-esterified fatty acids? Does the comparison with unsaturated fats change if the fats in question are exposed to heat and oxygen prior to consumption?"
Chemically, those fats are all different. Metabolically, many of them are transformed via catalytic proteins into different chemicals, with certain steps being rate-limited, or resource-competitive with other steps.
But it appears as though no one really knows all that much about fat, other than you need to eat a certain quantity of fatty acids with one double bond three carbons from the terminal end (omega-3) because the human body cannot produce those by itself, and they are required for certain hormones and structures.
As far as I know, coconut oil, when compared to most other common vegetable oils, has a higher fraction of saturated fatty acids in it, but those fatty acids are also significantly shorter than the fatty acids typically found in animal fats and other vegetable oils. They are different fats, and a human body digests them differently. Do they follow different metabolic chains to achieve the same result, or do they produce different results? I don't know. No research I have seen has delved that deeply into those properties of dietary fats.
there is probably an academic consensus that goes one way or the other, but our journalism has decayed enough that they don't even bother researching this.
Eat intelligently (I think we can agree that processed foods and sugar is less good than fresh veggies), and lower the stress.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-a-harvard-professor-is-call...
You'll probably be mostly fine whether you eat coconut oil or not, as long as the quantities are not completely unreasonable.
> toxins
Can you define what you mean in particular? Because half of the nonsense in the dietary space is talk about "toxins" (and "chemicals").
Cassava, better known in the US as the source material for tapioca, contains chemicals that can easily decompose into poisonous HCN. If you crush the cassava, as when biting it raw, the decomposition enzyme mixes with the chemicals and produces poison. If you leach and ferment the root in water, the toxins are removed. If you grind the root into paste and let the HCN escape into the atmosphere, the toxins are removed. Without those toxins, the food is safe[r] to eat.
Food is made of a lot of different chemicals, and digestion encompasses a lot of different catalyzed chemical reactions. Some chemicals will slow down, speed up, prevent, or enable reactions between other chemicals.
A lot of that just gets oversimplified to "toxin" because the information has to be understandable to people who don't have a doctorate-level education in biochemistry. Because of that oversimplification, scammers can exploit the intentional vagueness and ambiguity to turn fear into money. In that case, the "toxins" are just bullshit designed to scare you into buying stuff. The easiest way to distinguish between fact and FUD is by asking the claimant to name the toxin. If they can say "cyanogenic glucosides produce cyanide poisons on maceration that interfere with the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood" it's probably a real thing. If they say "big agri-corporations spray them on all the food to keep us unhealthy, fat, and depressed" it's probably bullshit.
My experience in academia is that researchers rely heavily on controversy and drama to further their studies. It's part of the game they have to play to continue to receive funding or gain attention in the public eye.
The author of the paper seems like he's marketing a problem that he'll try to solve in the coming years, by building a company that offers bespoke probiotic solutions based on analysis of an individual customer's microbiome. Not a bad business model honestly, it's spreadshirt for your gut.
NB: I run a nutrition company and have an MS
It's only nigh useless if you are some "standard issue normal human with no alterations (aka health issues)" and want generic advice about what works for everyone all the time. Then it's pretty eye-roll worthy, for what I feel are kind of obvious reasons.
There is nothing new about healthy living.
Eat plants. Drink water. Sleep well.
Don't add salt to anything. Avoid sugar. Eat meat only in moderation.
Fiber from beans makes you poo good.
Coffee and alcohol in moderation is alright. Drinking to the point of visible external intoxication is not "in moderation".
Exercise, even if only a walk in the evening.
If you are overweight, eat fewer calories each day than your body needs to function. If you are underweight, eat more calories each day than your body needs to function.
None of that sells books, or drives eyeballs to the latest ad-infested "Doctors say x will kill ya!" article.
This is a good guideline for people who are on a sad diet and get plenty of sodium from processed foods and meats, but someone following the other guidelines you list and not salting anything is likely to be more at risk of low sodium than high, depending on their personal risk factors (HBP and genetic history).
(assuming the reason "avoid overly processed foods" isn't listed is that it goes without saying)
Almost exactly year ago I started adding salt to everything. Not only did the drowsiness go away, I haven't had single muscle cramp in the twelve months since.
For example, in what regards coconut oil, it's far from just two doctors from Harvard recently saying that coconut oil is bad for you. From the wikipedia page on the vegetable fat:
Due to its high levels of saturated fat, the World Health Organization, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, United States Food and Drug Administration, American Heart Association, American Dietetic Association, British National Health Service, British Nutrition Foundation, and Dietitians of Canada advise that coconut oil consumption should be limited or avoided.
The same goes for various allegedly "controversial" subjects like saturated fat and heart disease, sugar, salt, etc. You can typically find advice by multiple public health organisations and multiple studies reporting findings very similar to each other, stretching back decades. Just because then a new study comes out that bucks the trend, which is immediately widely reported in the popular news as a "groundbreaking new study", or because someone (often, not an expert) writes a book that tells "the truth" about the subject, is no reason to get confused.
In science always follows the consensus, as in business always follow the money.
Cause that's about as "scientific" our nutrition analysis is.
Aside not eating carbohydrates (that whole diabetes thing), I have no clue what's 'healthy' and what's not.
These products were developed commercially based on what they could make and not on any analysis of what a person's intestinal flora should be, nor any proof that the deliver system worked.
And people ask why so much hate towards marketing industry...
One of those cases where the patent model works is the development of prescription drugs. The possibility of monopoly profits leads pharma companies to develop and test drugs and run them through a regulatory gauntlet. Critics say it is expensive, but it does work in the sense that new drugs get invented and some of them really are a boon.
For something like fish oil you can do the research but it benefits everybody else who sells fish oil, which, oddly enough, lowers my blood triglycerides like a drug although having put up no real benefits other than that for years.
Their trial on 46 people, also in the journal Cell, showed it led to delays in the normal healthy bacteria re-establishing themselves.
Dr Elinav added: "Contrary to the current dogma that probiotics are harmless and benefit everyone, these results reveal a new potential adverse side effect of probiotic use with antibiotics that might even bring long-term consequences."
If you only read the first few paragraphs (where they discussed the effect of probiotics on healthy people) you might have missed this important piece of information.
This discovery is hardly surprising. Probiotics aren't regulated by the FDA as drugs, but rather as "food supplements", which basically means they have the same standard of regulation as regular food [1].
[1] To be sold as a drug (i.e. pharmaceutical) a product must undergo rigorous trials to show efficacy and find any unintended side effects. Clinical trials typically cost around $60-80 million, which is part of the reason drugs are so expensive.
Pain relievers don't seem to help much and I also don't want to live on a daily diet of them.
(Personal anecdote of why I am inclined to believe your friend's experience)
Was that always like that?
EDIT: This might indeed have had something to do with 2007 change in EU's health regulations, as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actimel#Debates_surrounding_he....
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28267052
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3329544/
But, I don't feel that the second is a legitimate use of meta-analyses. Due to publication bias, the conclusions it draws are only useful if the efficacy of probiotics is a forgone conclusion.
Moreover: I have a huge question regarding their primary measure, specifically regarding their use of number from this study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14608267
Which show up as the 8th line of their risk-ratio calculation, but whose results have no relation to the values on that graph.
Moreover, this isn't peer reviewed, as far as I could see.
I would expect if they tried limiting their diet to foods compatible with the probiotics, they'd get more significant results, because the existing microbiome colonies would be stressed from lack of their usual junk/meat/fat and be weaker. (Almost all standard probiotics, other than dairy varieties [yogurt etc], are veg-carb-loving.)
Before refrigeration, there couldn't have been many probiotics consumed in isolated form rather than as fermented foods. Give the new bacteria some food to eat when they're trying to out-compete your existing (bad parts of your) gut microbiome. One of the most likely good foods for them to eat is what they've been cultured on.
It may not even be necessary to eat probiotics, if you already have some of the bacteria you want, you merely need to encourage it to out-compete bad microbiome bacterial strains. Eat food compatible with the good bacteria. But it's such a hassle to change diets, everyone wants a pill or a powder or one serving of probiotics they can add to their diet, keep everything else the same, and have the bad bacteria / imbalance miraculously disappear. Is it any surprise that's less likely to work?
If the reason you are taking them is to cull dangerous bacteria such as H.pylori, you would first have to bring their numbers down to a point where the probiotics have a fighting chance. This is typically either done with anti-biotics, or a combination of supplements such as aged garlic, mastic gum, coconut oil, etc... to first kill things off. Then after taking the probiotics, the candida overgrowth has to be purged with garlic extract. Very few people will take the time to go through the right steps throughout the days/weeks required to balance things out. This lends itself to a wide variability in results.
Basically I used to poop my pants weekly and couldn't work in an office.
Probiotics and keeping my eating to an 8 hour window (Intermittent Fasting) basically solved the issue for me.
However it makes sense to me that probiotics wouldn't do anything for someone who already has healthy gut bacteria.
Any office? Even the U.S. Patent Office?
At best, they've shown that blend to be quite useless as tested.