[garba_dlm]

except our bodies already kinda do that on their own

how would killing species of gut biota would helpful? helpful for whom to accomplish what??

we're headed to a future in which you have to take special pills so that the food doesn't kill you. like the glysophate and GMOs but applied against ALL life, including humans. if this is too far fetched for you then I also hope we don't get there.

[lelanthran]

> except our bodies already kinda do that on their own

> how would killing species of gut biota would helpful? helpful for whom to accomplish what??

OP wasn't talking about practical uses, he was talking about further experimentation in which the researchers narrow down exactly which gut bacteria has the effect.

Something like a binary search, or a git bisect.

[ChuckMcM]

insert this.gif :-). One of the things that would be interesting would be to understand if a specific kind of bacteria in the gut was the cause or if it was a ratio of some sort. One could imagine an easy to use diagnostic test[1] that could help inform you if you needed to do something or not.

If this causality pans out (and it would if it was replicated several times) then this would go a long way to helping people figure out if they needed to do something to avoid "early onset Alzheimers" or even Alzheimers in general. An acquaintance had a fecal transplant (yeah it sounds yucky but it isn't really) which consisted of a course of broad spectrum anti-biotics followed by the introduction of a "non-Cdiff gut biome". It "cured" their issue completely and it hasn't returned.

[1] When the Microbiome project was a thing I submitted mine. The fecal test was pretty easy (if 'yucky' from a poopy sort of way).

[acka]

> git bisect

please forgive me for reading this as 'gut bisect' the first time around :)

[nerdbert]

> how would killing species of gut biota would helpful? helpful for whom to accomplish what??

Helpful for building an understanding of the relative contributions of each type.

[ipaddr]

Helpful to the host so another type can flourish. Certain classes of antibiotics will wipe out species then similar but harmful types will colonize the space and you end up with autoimmune disorders.

[jjtheblunt]

> except our bodies already kinda do that on their own

do you mean it's hard to control for these parameters, because bodies will remove the controls via automatic processes?