• owsei@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    IIRC the biologist that runs the YT channel Though Emporium did this some years ago regarding his lactose intolerance and he had to get more after some years because his body didn’t naturally produce them

    But I hope this is different

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      18 hours ago

      lactose intolerance is a very very different thing from diabetes.
      Insulin is a fundamental part of keeping you alive, and if you fuck up the balance you can die which is why diabetes is such a big deal.

      Lactose intolerance is just the inability to digest a specific kind of sugar, which means bacteria in your digestive system can gorge themselves and give you an absurd amount of gas and other very unpleasant but ultimately not particularly dangerous consequences.

    • Jännät@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      Yeah I’d sorta assume that’d be the case with this treatment too, but I’m also an idiot with absolutely zero medical training

    • elbucho@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      This is a different matter entirely. The person who runs that channel (I love that channel, btw) does not have functional genes to produce lactase (the enzyme that lyses the bonds in lactose). Either he can’t make any lactase, or he can only make insufficient quantities of it.

      What he did was introduce lactase producing bacteria into his small intestine. This required him to kill off most of his gut flora and then repopulate it with compatible species, including some lactase producers. So it’s not exactly correct to say that he cured himself of lactose intolerance; he just got something to create lactase for him. He had to repeat the therapy years later because his gut flora changed over time (likely due to shifts in his diet), and the quantity of little lactase producing bacterial buddies living in his intestines declined.

      • owsei@programming.dev
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        18 hours ago

        Oohh. It’s been a while since I saw the video and I just remembered that he needed to do it again because it stopped working over time.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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        18 hours ago

        This is blatantly incorrect to a degree that i’d call it an outright lie, spending 30 seconds looking it up would show you that his video is literally titled “I Genetically Engineered MYSELF to Fix Lactose Intolerance”.

        • elbucho@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          Shit - you know what? You’re right. It’s been a while since I saw the video, and I had it mixed up in my mind with a similar video I saw of a guy doing a fecal transplant to fix his lactose intolerance. I went back to check the Thought Emporium video, and yeah - he used a retrovirus to introduce the E. coli lacZ gene into his small intestine’s brush border cells. That’s my bad; sorry about the misinfo. You’re also right that I could have easily looked it up, but I went from memory instead, and it was… unreliable.

          • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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            11 hours ago

            That virus will insert randomly into the genome. Huge risk of cancer, assuming it isn’t total bullshit like all of YouTube