The results have kept coming and it's hard not to believe the gut-health connection now but it's still frustrating that it doesn't translate to any therapy.
Compost does great things for plants, but you can’t sprinkle mycorrhizal fungi or banana peels on top of barren earth and call it a day. Similarly, you can’t throw probiotic bacteria or kimchi into a GI tract and call it a day.
Instead, in both cases, you have to holistically balance and change inputs over time to see results, taking into account the unique, pre-established state of the system. That makes for difficult research when so much of labwork is about controlling and isolating variables, and IMO, is the biggest factor in why we’re not seeing those pre-packaged applications yet.
I've been working on a monologue about reductivism vs reductionism and it reminds me of Doug Hofstader setting up a dialectic between reductionism and holism with the problem that you can't say holism has the same presence that reductionism has.
But soil health really is a place where holism reigns, thanks for reminding me!
The vast majority of GIs would agree with the grandparent post, but it even goes deeper than that. Pathogenicity of common bacteria is heavily mediated through HGT and interspecies microbial signaling - meaning that there’s plenty we don’t know about even the most studied organisms when they’re in a dynamic environment with other neighbors.
In other words, we know there are multiple layers of activity taking place that we’ve barely scratched the surface on research-wise, so we have good reason to believe that simpler explanations are almost certainly reductive and wrong.