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by connor4312 1431 days ago
Is your microbiome not "you"? It's as active a participant in your hormone balance as any other organ in your body.

You might say "I'm hungry", but it's not your rational brain deducing it's time to be hungry. Is an "I'm happy" triggered from the gut any less valid?

2 comments

> Is your microbiome not "you"? It's as active a participant in your hormone balance as any other organ in your body.

Your microbiome is definitely not "you". You can take antibiotics and nuke your entire microbiome, and you'll be mostly fine. Nuke "any other organ in your body" and you're gonna have much bigger problems.

The tenants in an apartment are not the apartment. You're the apartment, you're letting the microbiome stay as tenants as long as they pay their rent (break difficult foods to your advantage). Unruly tenants get thrown out. Of course it takes some effort to evict - this is the craving for particular foods that must be overcome to consciously stop eating those foods.

When my wife and kids are happy, I’m happy. When my microbiome is happy, I’m happy. Certainly when my microbiome is unhappy, I’m unhappy.
If you endure the unhappiness generated against you by your microbiome, you can change it. Eat what you know is good regardless of microbiome happiness, and you'll cultivate a microbiome that is happy when you eat that.

Your microbiome alters the very taste of foods in your mouth. It was hard for me to stop eating meat and start eating plants because the plants tasted like shit, but after some time sticking with it everything flipped - plants started tasting amazing, meat not so much anymore.

Well, why would you deliberately endure discomfort? That's one of the defining characteristics of our species: Our ability to consciously delay gratification to achieve better long term results.

If you starve your microbiome of sugar, then certain bacteria will die or go dormant.

Notwithstanding how you, or I, define “you”, once that change is made to your microbiome, you won’t find that coke to be very pleasurable.

I don’t think it’s about being less valid, but if you were to find out you were not making decisions for yourself rather someone or something else was controlling your decision making processes, would you make simple changes to take back control?