Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2023 February 6

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February 6

healthy diet microbiome

Was looking at this healthy diet article, under section microbiome it says Mechanistically, research suggests that the gut microbiome, which varies per person and changes throughout lifespan, is also involved in the beneficial effects, due to which various diet supplementations with prebiotics, various diverse (multi-strain) probiotics and synbiotics, and fecal microbiota transplantation are being investigated for life extension, mainly for prolonging healthspan, with many important questions being unresolved.

The ones who wrote this what do they mean by diet supplementations in this sentence: due to which various diet supplementations with prebiotics, various diverse (multi-strain) probiotics and synbiotics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_diet#Microbiome 118.210.107.193 (talk) 16:19, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

The editor(s) who wrote this either did not understand the material they reported on, or had insufficient command of the English language to communicate the material in a readily understandable way. We can only guess at the intention. The function of the adverb "Mechanistically" in the sentence is unclear. Surely, the things that are being investigated are not investigated due to their beneficial effects, but perhaps instead their effects are being investigated in the hope that they will turn out beneficial. Presumably, the cited sources will clarify the specifics of the various diet interventions.  --Lambiam 22:40, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

To add to what Lambiam said; never treat Wikipedia as a reliable source, and ESPECIALLY not for matters related to your health. Instead, what you should do is use Wikipedia as a pointer to reliable sources. Find the little superscript tags next to passages in wikipedia like this^[12] and click them, and it will direct you to where the author of the Wikipedia article got their information from. Ideally, THAT should be a reliable source, and you should be getting your information from those sources, not from Wikipedia directly. --Jayron32 14:38, 7 February 2023 (UTC)