[Skybird]

On the "Microbiome"


From the NZZ:
When I talk to someone about a disease, it usually doesn't take long before the microbiome comes into play. "I'm sure it has something to do with the microbiome," says the other person, revealing himself to be a well-read contemporary. Because the media are full of it. Whether it's Alzheimer's, heart attacks or rheumatism - everything seems to be somehow related to the bacteria and fungi in our bodies: the microbiome, in other words.

And that is probably not wrong. Just as most things are somehow related to sleep. With stress. Nutrition. Metabolism. The psyche. Medicine speaks of non-specific effects. Which means as much as: We don't really understand the connection.

This is also true of the microbiome - and how it keeps us healthy or makes us ill. This makes good research all the more important. In recent years, research on this topic has boomed. The result is a flood of scientific and journalistic articles. As is often the case with fashionable topics, everyone copies from everyone else, hoping that the facts in the other article will already be correct.

This leads to errors being repeated until they become part of the scientific literature - and no one questions them anymore. No one? In the case of microbiome reporting, two British scientists who are themselves doing research on the microbiome took the trouble to check a few of the most common claims for their truth content. In the process, they came across ten "facts" that they debunked as myths and misconceptions in the scientific journal Nature Microbiology.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01426-7

Conclusions

The microbiome field is broad, and there are many other controversial topics that might also have been included here. However, knowledge is still evolving on many of these; consequently, we have largely focused on concepts where we believe there is a strong evidence base for rejecting myths and misconceptions. Although some of the points above may seem trivial, we argue that the accuracy of details such as these matters. If we are consistently repeating falsehoods about minor details, can our accuracy be relied upon when covering more important matters? We hope that, by illustrating just a few examples of microbiome myths and misconceptions, we can draw increased attention to the potential problems of over-simplification and insufficient critical assessment in the microbiome literature.
Given the many potential health impacts, the huge amount of funding and the keen public interest in microbiomes, rejection of unfounded assertions is crucial if we wish to avoid expending finite resources researching unproductive avenues and undermining public confidence in our conclusions.