Is the idea that most diseases originate in the gut "fake news"?

Well, perhaps not wholly.

But first let me explain the background of my interest in the matter, then let me give you the case for what I call the "gut thesis" being "fake news", and lastly let me provide a couple of caveats and futher thoughts.

So, background: I have for perhaps five years now followed the discussion around the thesis that many, if not most, diseases originate in the gut. I have also followed the concomitant discussion around diet, and which diets might best "detoxify" and "heal" the gut.

And here's the case (briefly!) against the "gut thesis". To take just one element of it: milk and milk products are supposed to be very bad for humans. But the diet of India's Brahmin caste (which has married only among themselves till very recently) has for something like a thousand years focused only on milk, milk products, nuts, cereals, vegetables and fruit - milk and lentils are the only sources of protein (though I should explain that *some* brahmins in India's coastal areas do take beef and/ or fish). According to the "gut thesis", India's Brahmins should be among the most disease-prone groups on the planet - but that is simply not the case.... Do we really need more proof than that? (On the other hand, and more broadly, why does "medical science" think that isolated experiments focusing on only one very narrow strand can prove or disprove anything in an area as multi-dimensional and complex as human health? Why does "medical science" routinely dismiss evidence staring it in the face from a thousand years of medically-relevant history?).

Finally, here is my caveat: I am not saying that *no* disease originates in the gut. Nor am I saying that milk-allergies don't exist. That the gut cannot be damaged/ infected is no part of my argument! Clearly, the gut is very important, and anything that improves the health of the gut must be a good thing. But are the now-fashionable theories and the deductions based on these theories necessarily valid? In fact, are the now-fashionable practices (diets, etc) based on anything other than fashion?

Clearly, certain individuals do have allergy to milk, etc - though whether or how much that has anything to do with the "gut thesis" remains to be proven.

BTW, I acknowledge that various "detox" practices enable people to "feel" much better. I have an open mind on whether this is due to an actual improvement in health, or merely a placebo effect (on placebo effects and medicine, do see the post on my medical blog: https://guptaramedical.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/placebo-effect.html).

Conclusion: please do follow any diet you think is going to be of help to you. And, if it does help you, great! But don't imagine that the scientific basis your diet claims therefore has validity. Consider the parallel with yoga and acupuncture - clearly, these things "work" to improve the health of many individuals. But that does not prove that their theories of chakras/ energy flows are objectively true. There could be very little relationship between their theories, and whether or not they succeed in helping people. Or think of all those things in comparison with electicity: we can and do use electricity more or less safely and effectively. But we understand very little of electricity (and for that matter, magnetism). Newer and better theories of electricity, magnetism and indeed everything can and do continue to be invented or constucted, but all their "prrofs" remain (and should remain) tendentious.

P.S. I therefore reject the tenet of "modern medicine" that we have to understand the mechanism of action of a particular medicine before we approve of it for use. All understandings of mechanisms of action in the case of medicines are merely provisional anyway. And therefore merely comforting illusions. Whether or not we understand mechanisms of action is, if not entirely irrelevant, merely helpful in some incidental way. What matters is simply whether something works.