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Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

neuroscientists are just mad that "gut feeling" is actually the truth, and we're generally being manipulated by the billions of microbes in our guts. Simple example: why do people crave cake when they're on a diet that doesn't allow cake? There are microbes that convert stuff in grasses (corn, etc) into opioids. Opioids are great, make us feel great, and if we are used to having opioids and suddenly stop, we go into opioid withdrawal.

I haven't really put a fine point on the grand theory of gut-mind-body interaction, but i'm fairly certain that nearly every disorder or disease that isn't external (like radiation or malaria) will eventually be traced back to gut flora, from auto-immune disorders to depression.

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Cake does not generally contain grasses...and if it were true that there were trains of gut flora that converted sugars to opioids almost everyone in America would live in a perpetual state of intoxication. Sugar withdrawal is also not even remotely similar to opioid withdrawal.

Cake usually contains flour, which is made from wheat, which is a form of grass...

No, wheat is made from the seeds, i.e., the grain, of wheatgrass, not the grass.

That some bacteria are able to eat the cellulose or other cells in grass is absolutely unrelated to their ability to consume the completely different structures and nutrients in a seed.

sugar is a grass, or corn syrup, which is from a grass...

edit: also opiate and opioid are different, i'm talking about the brain chemical, not the drug.

If you're going to say something silly like sugar is a grass it's clear you don't know what you're talking about and I'm going to leave this conversation.

Most sugar in the U.S. is made from beets, which are not a grass.

Also...dark chocolate, soy, spinach, fruit, meat, and coffee are opiate triggers, so if sugar is bad because it triggers an opiate response, so is most of the human diet. It turns out the bodies response to eating...is to trigger an opiate response.

>Sugar cane production Sugar cane is a grass native to Asia and grows mostly in tropical and subtropical areas. In terms of the U.S. sugar cane production by state, it is mainly concentrated in the federal states of Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Hawaii. In 2021, Florida produced around 17.3 million tons of sugar cane and was expected to produce nearly the same quantity the following year. During this period, Florida accounted for more than half of the country’s total sugar cane production. Some nine hundred thousand acres of sugar cane are harvested yearly in the United States, generating over one billion U.S. dollars in annual revenues.

> Since the mid-2000s, sugarcane has accounted for between 40 and 45 percent of the total sugar produced domestically, and sugarbeets accounted for between 55 and 60 percent of production.

Sugar cane is a grass, and when i make a cake i use wheat flour and cane sugar.

I also know about sugar beets, but i specifically said "grasses". Saying that corn and sugar and wheat aren't grasses is hilarious. It doesn't matter what part we eat, as it's the gut flora that process it into the opioids, and they can't tell grass from the thing grass comes from.

Fukudome S.-I., Yoshikawa M. Opioid peptides derived from wheat gluten: Their isolation and characterization. Febs Lett. 1992;296:107–111. doi: 10.1016/0014-5793(92)80414-C. for example

Once you're refining specifically sugarcane down to just sugar, "stuff in grasses" is a really confusing way to describe it. And it's not even right with corn, where the starch has to be chemically altered first.

Huh? Relevance? This has nothing to do with the biophysics of action potentials.

"neuroscientists" and the like go deep in the weeds with what/how different chemicals interact with cells, neurons, etc; but in general i don't read a lot of papers that try to answer "why". Scientists studied automobiles and discovered that applying pressure to a lever in the car causes the motion of the car to slow and possibly stop. End of paper, we proved cars stopped when we put pressure on a lever. No mention of friction anywhere.

I've been balking about this since at least 2006-2007 online and in person, and it took about a decade for studies that showed "why", not just "how/what". Then again, most people don't know that our bodies have dedicated receptors for nicotinoids, cannibinoids, opioids. Most people also don't know that tomato ketchup has nicotine in it, or that nearly all grasses contain the precursors to opioids in them. Once your intestines get a substance, nearly all bets are off as to what comes out, at what rate, and what volume.

So, essentially, that neuroscientists disagree isn't novel. They're laser focused on the post hoc, rather than the cause(s).

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