There was once a research group in a university that found a specific diet helping/curing crohn's. However a food/health conglomerate with a product in the market for the disease paid the professor to shelf the research and it never saw the light of day.
Speaking with one of the researchers he keeps telling me that food diversity and gut microbiome are extremely important for all shorts of things. So your comment doesn't surprise me, I am glad you became better.
The relationship between diet, microbiome, and health is fascinating.
Another metabolite of L. reuteri is ergothioneine, which is hypothesized to be a "longevity vitamin"[1] by biologist Bruce Ames[2]. Plants and animals cannot synthesize it, only fungi and bacteria, but it is found in every cell in our body including in high concentrations in mitochondria. It appears to be important enough that mammals have evolved a specialized transporter for uptake of this compound (SLC22A4), and mutations in this gene are associated with Crohn's disease.
Low levels of it have been linked to cognitive impairment, CVD, even depression and sleep disorders[3].
Macros aren't everything when it comes to diet, there's a whole universe of micronutrient interactions ongoing in our cells every day. Since we are in a position of relatively near total ignorance, I agree that we should pursue food diversity by default.
Why is the parent comment not being downvoted to oblivion? It is making specific, deterministic claims and providing absolutely no sources whatsoever.
How does the OP know? Which university was it? Which research group? If "a research group" "found something worked" then there would be a trail of research papers leading up to whatever the patentable invention is.
This anecdote is a complete fabrication: events like this plain do not happen and shouldn't pass the snifftest for anyone: "a professor was paid off" - oh okay, well what about his graduate students? Honors students?
1. I don't win anything by accusing a conglomerate with names on the internet. I don't mind being downvoted "to oblivion". I think I haven't because anyone interacting with such organisations imagines that this is not conspiracy, its business
2. I want to clarify that the company didn't say "we pay you X to keep it unpublished" they said "Oh thats interesting, we want to buy it to develop something based on it" and then they did nothing with it because it would canibalize their market.
3. Students that worked on this knew it, but they did nothing about it, the one I know the story from told me "what could I do? I finished my thesis and left, it was above me" and he actually works on a pharma now. I imagine being a vocal ethicist in this field would have left him without a job. Not something many people can afford.
"Oh thats interesting, we want to buy it to develop something based on it"
But it's a diet. There's nothing to sell with a diet, so again, what are you talking about?
But you know what let's run with this for a moment because it comes up a lot: you know what happens when a research group has an exciting new X, sells the patent on it and then nothing appears to happen? It doesn't actually work.
This story comes up a lot and frankly, HN should realise it: products are hard, hardware is even harder, try doing bio-anything even more so
There's not a conspiracy, which you are still trying to push with your comments here, the answer is just that it turns out not to work that well. Or that "revolutionary" actually means "minor overall improvement we generally expect from the market".
I appreciate your scepticism. I would probably do the same. Unfortunately I can't provide more information because its second-hand story and I just trust this person. Hence I did not verify everything they said. I do not know what kind of product they could develop from a diet (or if they ever wanted to). I know they had a product out for this and its an obvious conflict of interest.
I am not pushing any conspiracy here, my main points here was that gut microbiome is cutting edge research, and its actually a multi-disciplinary one since most nutritionists don't know a lot about the gut, and most gut doctors don't know a lot about nutrition (at least where I live). IBD is a prime candidate that I know of (but unfortunately I don't have a paper about it, because of whatever conspiracy or corporate greed reason) that can be helped with nutrition. But i've seen papers around talking about mental effects of the gut health too.
Why must we "downvote it to oblivion" just because the comment doesn't provide the particular info you want? I'd like more info, too, but I'm OK with just leaving the comment as it is instead of throwing a polemic fit over it.
It wouldn't be the first time Big Pharma did something harmful to society in order to protect its profit margins. You don't seriously think there is a moral stance that leads one to conclude Big Pharma is benevolent and always looking out for humanity?
I would say that Big Food hiring food scientists to specifically tune the flavor profile of mass manufactured foods to never trigger satiation so that people would not stop eating them even when they are mechanically full is pretty evil.
Big food came into existence thanks to scientific advancements that enabled the world to meet the needs of its population, and that's a good thing. Fertilizers and industrial agriculture has been a massive boon to most of the world, but allowing companies that have private shareholders to commandeer the ship and start steering it in a way that best benefits those shareholders over the best interests of the rest of the world has, in my opinion, created a system that has turned a great good into a perfidious evil.
Sometimes the need to "win" an argument can come second. The story here is about corporate greed. I can easily imagine a team meeting where someone brought up the research and people knew it might hurt sales even if it turns out that its not replicable or anything. No one probably said "lets buy it out so people won't be cured", I assume it was an innovation manager pitching "we can make a new supplements formula based on the nutritional value of this diet". Business people agreed, knowing its a win-win. Next agenda item.
No, the key word here, is: trust. You have more of it than you should for Big Pharma, given that that the facts of historical precedent, combined with the economics of addiction that are clearly exploited by the industry, do not support such subservient trust.
Have you never thought about the Pusher and Junkie relationship, at industrial scale? Because that is what Big Pharma is all about.
I am familiar with the Oxycontin drug pushing scandal. However, that doesn't automatically mean I'm going to start trusting unsourced internet comments; that way lies ivermectin madness.
Yeah, the situation is far worse than the Oxycontin scandal alone, which is really just the tip of the iceberg and is not an outlier situation with this industry:
> American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc. (hereinafter together "Pfizer") have agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products, the Justice Department announced today.
You should start being a lot, lot more suspicious of claims made by Big Pharma, and start holding them actually accountable for their very real crimes. Anything less is complicity with an industry well-known for exploiting the pusher/junkie equation.
Well... what was the diet? I have UC. I've found that the less I eat, the better my symptoms are, but I can't eat exclusively protein smoothies and kimchi forever.
Speaking with one of the researchers he keeps telling me that food diversity and gut microbiome are extremely important for all shorts of things. So your comment doesn't surprise me, I am glad you became better.