I suspect, from my own anecdata, it's because a great many of us in the field have had gut issues. A lot of us lead lifestyles that aren't necessarily the greatest (although I feel overall that old adage is changing for the better rapidly) and have a deep interest in fixing the problem. Plus, knowing how things work, biological, electrical, whatever.. it all fits the hacker ethos

Is that your "gut feeling"?

Finding shortcuts is literally hacking. Let's shortcut our way to good health by reading Wikipedia instead of seeing a doctor. Okay then

No one should entrust their health solely to a doctor. It is like entrusting our life to technical support, which half the time is terrible.

No, not instead of as in "never see a doctor" but rather as trying to be smart about things you can do yourself. For example:

Healthier lifestyle: do you need to consult a doctor to decide to cut down smoking or even stop it? (No) Start exercising? (Most likely, no, thise few who need will likely know.) Changing your diet? (No, unless you are doing something very special.)

Picking up some basic skills also means you can treat smaller issues yourself. I keep iodine solution, painkillers, and wrapping bandages for smaller sprains readily available at home. Leave antibiotica, wounds beyond scratches (could have been infected by tetanus or other nasty stuff) to the professionals.

Well, it's literally seen as a medical revolution.

"There is increasing evidence that the microbiome and its output (our interactome) touch many, if not most, pathways that affect health, disease, and aging. It is reasonable to propose that the composition of the microbiome and its activities are involved in most, if not all, of the biological processes that constitute human health and disease, as we proceed through our own life cycle"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191014/

Don't get too ahead of yourself. Sure we have a lot of evidence that your microbiome is important in things like C. difficile infection, but I've only seen very tenuous evidence supporting any impact on things like aging.

Not to say it might be discovered in the future. But it also stands a good chance of being a dead end.

> Don't get too ahead of yourself.

That quote about aging is from Blaser:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_J._Blaser

It's a relatively new field of medicine, with some compelling evidence that it might help. Importantly, the microbiome is very amenable to manipulation - directed and undirected. There's very much a prospect for being able to design the microbiome - something that's logically appealing to the mindset of many people who post on HN.

There's evidence that gut flora have a hand in many diseases including obesity, Crohn's, depression, etc. We know so little about it, as is the case with many of the details of our body's daily functions.

Our gut bacteria is the interested party - not our brains. Microbiomes are really excited to finally be getting some press for all their hard work.

Because gut issues have been implicated in a whole lot of common maladies, but the precise nature of the interactions of gut bacteria and their human hosts has yet to be determined, making it very intellectually intriguing. Especially for those of us with chronic conditions that are finally starting to see treatment success with carefully targeted probiotics or fecal transplants.

We are exploring and learning to hack the most complicated system we are aware of. Even the smallest component is truly remarkable.

Because the paleo- and keto-eating HN master race are curious about answers to the question "why would anyone eat anything else?"

Having cured all of the physical injuries that one would encounter from having an active lifestyle (knee injuries, head trauma, etc.) we now have more time to focus on things that are more esoteric and only manifest in subtle ways. Cancer, autism, etc. are the problems of the first world, industrialized, and coddled demographic that a site with this title would have.