>By eating foods that foster serotonin production in the gut, theoretically more serotonin would be available for the brain, but it is not a totally linear correlation, as serotonin in the gut does not necessarily make it to the brain.

Serotonin produced in the gut does not make it to the brain. Serotonin that circulates in the periphery functions more like a hormone and does not cross the blood-brain barrier to impact "serotonin available for the brain".

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>There’s also research that shows cortisol (a stress hormone) can negatively impact gut health, which may be why some people feel the need to evacuate their bowls when they’re scared (colloquial known as “shitting one’s pants”).

Where are you getting your information? This whole comment is full of misinformation.

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Edit:

Thanks u/volcanoesarecool. I can't respond because I was blocked for whatever reason, but I appreciate the info.

I don't understand the value of this research. Depression has been known to correlate with memory dysfunction and decreased hippocampal volume. 5-HT4 (serotonin 4) receptors have been known to be involved with memory, and the structural plasticity effects within the hippocampus.

However, compared to other serotonin receptors, the function of 5-HT4 throughout the brain and periphery is diverse and complex — which makes sense when considering how relatively large / complicated the gene encoding 5-HT4 is, and how little is known about the regulation of its transcription.

There is strong evidence regarding the involvement of 5-HT4 in depression, but imaging that quantifies global reductions is completely insufficient. Humans show different responses in 5-HT4R expression in different brain regions. SSRIs have been shown to decrease global 5-HT4 binding. Depressed suicide victims show increased 5-HT4 receptor binding in the caudate nucleus and frontal cortex.

This study has zero value in paving the way for new drugs.

I think it's a mistake to say compounds that primarily modulate the serotonin system relieve depression.

Considering the delayed 'time of effect' of the therapeutic actions of compounds targeting the serotonin system, it's clear the adaptive structural / functional changes are not specific to serotonergic signaling — be it at the synaptic, or intracellular level.

For example, underlying these changes in plasticity are interactions with the BDNF system, as pretty much all effective antidepressant therapies lead to increases in levels of BDNF mRNA.

There are plenty of other systems at play, and they interact via a variety of feedback mechanisms to regulate the circuits involved in affective behaviors.

>The incidence of daily cognitive failures was assessed by the 13-item Cognitive Failures in Everyday Life Scale, in which the participants indicated whether they had experienced cognitive failures such as leaving tasks unfinished due to distraction, failing to remember the right word to use, or unintentionally allowing their mind to wander.

Incidentally, many participants had trouble completing the daily assessment, because they experienced cognitive failures such as leaving sections unfinished due to distraction, failing to remember what they did that day, or unintentionally allowing their mind to wander.

Food is more associated with microbiome composition, and relative shifts in that composition (like you said).

As for food-to-gut transmission, food has been found to be mostly a non-factor in introducing new strains to our microbiome. Mostly, this is because the microorganisms that make up our microbiome cannot survive for long outside the body.

That said, food-to-gut transmission may play a bigger role than currently theorized. As of now though, it's person-to-person strain transmission that looks to be mostly responsible for microbiome diversity.

Humor is supposed to be funny.

This is unrelated to the food at parties. It's the social interaction itself (person-to person transmission) that would induce this microbiome diversity.

>It appears that any contact between the unborn fetus and the mothers’ vaginal microbiome (for example, through rupture of membranes in labor) results in early microbial seeding and potential long-term health benefits for the newborn. In a study of 18 maternal/newborn dyads, the microbiome of mothers and babies in three groups were compared: newborns born vaginally, newborns born via cesarean with standard post-op treatment, and newborns born via cesarean who were exposed to maternal vaginal fluids immediately following birth Dominguez-Bello et al., 2016. Within two minutes of birth, newborns in the last group had their mouth, face, and body swabbed with a gauze pad that had been incubated for an hour in their mothers’ vagina. These gut, oral, and skin microbiome of these newborns were more similar to vaginally-born newborns than to other newborns who experienced the standard cesarean birth. This similarity persisted through one month of life, when the study ended. These findings are consistent with population-based studies showing that children born via elective cesarean birth (no labor) are at higher risk for health problems like asthma compared to children who had some exposure to their mother’s vaginal microbiome during labor, even if labor ended in cesarean Kristensen & Henriksen, 2016.

I believe this is related to the baby not coming into contact with the vaginal microbiome. It's not related to poop.

Edit: I laughed at OPs comment. Yours was simply unfunny, irrelevant misinformation. Everyone is a pedant when you're a moron.

This research specifically investigated person-to-person bacterial strain transmission. Diet is considered more of a factor in the relative composition of our microbiome, not the uniqueness of the bacterial strains that it's composed of. Very few strains in our microbiome can survive for long outside the human body.

Apparently, they tried to correct for food-to-gut transmission by disregarding strains that had any genome-based similarity to what's been found in commercially available food. How effective this correction was is TBD because there's so much unknown regarding microbiome transmission.

As of now, it seems person-to-person strain transmission is distance-based within shared environments. Still, food-to-gut strain transmission could be a factor. Lots more to discover.

Not trying to discredit this specific study / article, but why are there so many PsyPost articles in this subreddit? It's a pretty terrible source, and the majority of the time I look into the research referenced it's either misrepresented, terribly flawed methodologically, or objectively biased.

The replacement was actually made for individual agency reports, not the whole dataset. So, definitely not just rounding errors.

Regardless of how I feel about this topic, this study is layered with so many questionable assumptions and manipulations of data, it's hard to take any of their conclusions seriously.

With an initial sample of 15,851 agencies and 11,058,289 posts, there better be good reason for excluding ~63% and ~94% of them respectively.

> > We took several steps to clean the data.
>

> - A very small number of agency-months report 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 or 60,000 arrests for a given crime type. Because these figures are improbably large, we assumed they actually reflect missing values. > - In the rows the total number of arrests for at least one crime type is smaller than the sum of race-specific arrests for that crime, we replaced the total number of arrests with the sum of race-specific arrests. > - We dropped incidents in which the most serious offense was not a UCR Part I offense. > - We drop rows for suspects who lack race information.

> > We then compute agency-level measures of the proportion of reported offenders who are Black based on the remaining rows. >

Wow. I guess they really did "clean" the data.

Wow. That was one of the most laughable articles I've ever read. I'm fluctuating between disgust and awe. Feels strange. Intentions of the author aside, this article is pure art — an absolute satirical masterpiece.

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>According to the meta-charity GiveWell, the most effective charities can save a child’s life for between 3 and 5,000 US dollars. One way of understanding this figure is that whenever you consider spending that amount of money, one of the things you would be choosing not to spend it on is saving a child’s life. Take the median of the GiveWell figures: $4,000. I propose that prices for all goods and services should be listed in the universal alternative currency of percentage of a Child’s Life Not Saved (%CLNS), as well as their regular prices in Euros, dollars, or whatever

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Funny, because same Givewell, opposes an “explicit expected-value” (EEV) approach to giving/donation, and believe it to be intuitively problematic. Their conclusion states that "Any approach to decision-making that relies only on rough estimates of expected value – and does not incorporate preferences for better-grounded estimates over shakier estimates – is flawed."

Some of their points:

>- There seems to be nothing in EEV that penalizes relative ignorance or relatively poorly grounded estimates, or rewards investigation and the forming of particularly well grounded estimates. If I can literally save a child I see drowning by ruining a $1000 suit, but in the same moment I make a wild guess that this $1000 could save 2 lives if put toward medical research, EEV seems to indicate that I should opt for the latter. >- Because of this, a world in which people acted based on EEV would seem to be problematic in various ways. > - In such a world, it seems that nearly all altruists would put nearly all of their resources toward helping people they knew little about, rather than helping themselves, their families and their communities. I believe that the world would be worse off if people behaved in this way, or at least if they took it to an extreme. (There are always more people you know little about than people you know well, and EEV estimates of how much good you can do for people you don’t know seem likely to have higher variance than EEV estimates of how much good you can do for people you do know. Therefore, it seems likely that the highest-EEV action directed at people you don’t know will have higher EEV than the highest-EEV action directed at people you do know.) > - In such a world, when people decided that a particular endeavor/action had outstandingly high EEV, there would (too often) be no justification for costly skeptical inquiry of this endeavor/action. For example, say that people were trying to manipulate the weather; that someone hypothesized that they had no power for such manipulation; and that the EEV of trying to manipulate the weather was much higher than the EEV of other things that could be done with the same resources. It would be difficult to justify a costly investigation of the “trying to manipulate the weather is a waste of time” hypothesis in this framework. Yet it seems that when people are valuing one action far above others, based on thin information, this is the time when skeptical inquiry is needed most. And more generally, it seems that challenging and investigating our most firmly held, “high-estimated-probability” beliefs – even when doing so has been costly – has been quite beneficial to society. >- Related: giving based on EEV seems to create bad incentives. EEV doesn’t seem to allow rewarding charities for transparency or penalizing them for opacity: it simply recommends giving to the charity with the highest estimated expected value, regardless of how well-grounded the estimate is. Therefore, in a world in which most donors used EEV to give, charities would have every incentive to announce that they were focusing on the highest expected-value programs, without disclosing any details of their operations that might show they were achieving less value than theoretical estimates said they ought to be.

For their full reasoning and objections, here's the article: Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased).

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Back to the posted article...

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>The justification for this would be to fix a gap in the way the price system functions. Normally we make our consumption decisions entirely in terms of a consideration of how much we want something and how much we can afford, a matter of prudence only. As economists have analysed, such exercises in constrained maximisation are all we need do to enjoy a flourishing economy since by responding to prices we automatically take into account the social cost to others of resources being used for what we want rather than for something else (so long as some wise and non-self-interested government steps in to correct for externalities).

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Ah, the rational choice theory of economics. The theory that assumes people always act rationally, are emotionally exempt, culturally homogenous, identical in values, and remain in a state of conscious logical processing unaffected by unconscious impulses or natural biases. Presented as a fact that underlies consumption, and not just a gross simplification used to create economic models of questionable real-world value.

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>Lots of people have nice-sounding ideas about what we should do or care about to make the world better. Unfortunately many of their proposals display a lack of quantitative thinking, which makes their proposals very hard to evaluate.

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Yeah, this idea doesn't sound nice at all, and it also displays a lack of quantitative thinking. However, I will say, it is very very easy to evaluate.