Anything that damages the gut microbiome. Ultra-processed foods are one of many things. Antibiotics may be the biggest factor.

If health is a topic you’re interested in, I created a forum that matches your description: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/

Hopefully, it won’t be too long before Xenforo forums can federate with Lemmy.

I’ve tried going to back to forums after leaving Reddit, but many of them are filled with the same type of unintelligent people you find on Reddit and other social media.

That said, I’d still stick with forums & lemmy over Reddit.

I think Lemmy was being astroturfed during the recent reddit API controversy and exodus of some redditors to lemmy. Lemmy seems much more normal now, whereas reddit is still manipulated, astroturfed, and botted to hell.

No. Lemmy > Tildes.

Tildes should be avoided as much as reddit: https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2023/06/reddit-is-dangerous-humanity-needs-an-alternative.html

Tildes: I’m not a fan of the UI/whitespace, but the invite-only nature of it keeps it high-quality. It’s another nice & unique option, but has the same “single owner” issue, as Saidit, Reddit, etc., so it would be risky to dedicate time and effort to building a community there. In the blink of an eye your years of work could be terminated by one person. I’ve also read multiple concerns/complaints about heavy-handed moderation, similar to what occurs on Reddit.

Tildes update:

I made a Tildes account many years ago when it first started up. I knew the founder was a Reddit admin, and I’d heard that it was a haven for Reddit admins & power-mods, but I hadn’t spent much time there.

I recently made a post about the problems with Reddit, and while there were intelligent people and comments on there, the majority of votes went to people who were being extremely dishonest, and even outright lying; attacking me in every way possible while urging the admin to ban me. Neutral people don’t behave like that. So they couldn’t have made it more obvious that Tildes is merely an extension of authority-figures-of-Reddit with a different UI. All the same problematic people & behaviors exist there.

Based on the accusations one of them was making, and my history they were pulling up, one of them was either a Reddit admin or someone in cahoots with one of the Reddit admins that banned me. Tildes is invite-only, and the main accounts attacking me were brand new.

The Tildes admin removed my comments debunking the lies they were telling, and deleted my account.

My experience with Reddit has made me extremely hesitant to put in any amount of effort or commitment into any platform I don’t own/control myself, and this recent experience with Tildes greatly confirms that concern.

This is an absolutely nonsensical response, and a red herring logical fallacy. Extremely dishonest and unintelligent.

This is the original comment that linked to a plethora of scientific evidence: https://lemmy.world/post/37315936/19936596

This reply, and the votes on both of our comments, confirm exactly what I described.

Instead of reviewing the scientific evidence and changing one’s position accordingly, this guy went massively out of his way to try to create a personal attack, and everyone supported it because no one here is interested in the science/evidence, they’re just trying to support their preconceived notions & biases.

Extremely unintelligent & anti-scientific behavior.

Given this; and I only gave it a cursory look, why hasn’t this been picked up by a university?

That’s a great question. I wrote more about it here: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/continued-letters-and-complaints-to-the-fda-nih-and-hhs-jan-2025-fmt.842/. It appears to be primarily incompetence and apathy. The FMT donor quality situation requires unique action, and they’ve shown an unwillingness to do that.

There’s also pharmaceutical industry influence and other monied interests, including by academics themselves: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/tags/research-industrial-complex/

Second, what motive does the FDA have to stall an effective medicine?

They may not be purposefully stalling it. FMT is very unique from other things they regulate, and they haven’t shown any interest in creating FMT-specific/appropriate regulation. There’s little pressure on them to do so, so they may just be playing it safe and not taking any risks that might cause public outcry.

Regarding the current administration, they may be lying about ending the chronic disease crisis:

• https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/rfk-jrs-maha-project-funnels-millions-from-public-health-to-private-we.1101/
• https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/rfk-jr-hosts-roundtable-on-long-covid-sep-18-2025.1182/
• https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/priorities-for-a-new-fda-martin-makary-vinay-prasad-jun-2025.1146/
• https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/fda-names-former-pharmaceutical-company-executive-dr-george-tidmarsh-t.1129/
• https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/us-fda-makarys-pharma-ceo-tour-goes-against-transparency-rhetoric-may.1097/

Dad had been a medical-researcher: he taught me to think.

He didn’t teach you very well. Stop spreading harmful misinformation.

And to the people upvoting the misinformation, you really need to do some basic research and critical thinking first. Why would there be hundreds of FMT clinical trials around the world for curing chronic diseases if it were so easy with probiotics? Why would 60%+ of Americans have a chronic disease if you could simply cure them with probiotics?

It makes it seem very possible that the comment and upvotes above are deliberate astroturfing by the pharmaceutical industry.

The headline is completely misleading & false, but since it supports people’s biases, everyone is mindlessly agreeing with it.

If you want to actually learn about the cause of autism, and similar conditions, review the evidence: https://humanmicrobiome.info/brain/

There’s an existing cure for most chronic diseases. Unfortunately, no one seems to care, so it will likely never be available.

OP, given your knowledge of news media, perhaps you have some ideas of how to get coverage of the issue? I’ve written to dozens of news outlets about it.

It says who they are in their signature. And a plethora of peer-reviewed papers are cited.

I guess all the people solely cheering for this aren’t aware of the damage we’ve been doing to ourselves with antibiotics:

While antibiotic resistance gets all the attention, the damage being done to our host-native microbiomes is arguably as big a threat as climate change, as the damage compounds over generations, and once it’s gone you can’t get it back. (Apr 2019).

Resistance may already be a solved problem: https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#fmt-to-counter-antibiotic-resistance