Right, we probably largely agree with each other. I don’t dispute looking for super donors amongst top athletes, as that way you can do a unilateral search (ie. you find a list of top athletes and start asking). In the context of directly asking for recommendations, you gain the possibility of listing any criteria, that can be far more personal and less searchable, and you’ll gain access to populations you can’t through search. For example, if the criteria is “seems to never fall ill, recovers extremely quickly from illness or injury, highly active and motivated”, you can’t search for that but I can recommend the top people of my network that meet this criteria, and then you could interview them and get their recommendations along those criteria, and you move up those links to finding more and more healthy people.
I skimmed the one study on top athletes being better than less top athletes (the one with traditional martial arts ie. not martial arts but actually gymnastics) and was not particularly convinced it was a good basis (because of don’t trust one study, and because the critera for being a top athlete in an art+gymnastics competition might not be so objective as to strongly relate to gut microbia. I would have been more reassured if it was on powerlifting with a continuously rising correlation between weight lifted and ‘gut health’.
For the specific person I gave as example, he’ll be approaching mid thirties by now so though I strongly feel he’d be a very strong candidate at 25 (also the peak of his athletic performance), he seems less particularly appropriate now due to age and not practising sports as much in the last few years.
I don’t want to be a dead end either, I can forward this article to folks in that engineering school currently (who’ll be around 25) and see if there’s anyone interested enough that I could give you their contact details to continue from.
Right, we probably largely agree with each other. I don’t dispute looking for super donors amongst top athletes, as that way you can do a unilateral search (ie. you find a list of top athletes and start asking). In the context of directly asking for recommendations, you gain the possibility of listing any criteria, that can be far more personal and less searchable, and you’ll gain access to populations you can’t through search. For example, if the criteria is “seems to never fall ill, recovers extremely quickly from illness or injury, highly active and motivated”, you can’t search for that but I can recommend the top people of my network that meet this criteria, and then you could interview them and get their recommendations along those criteria, and you move up those links to finding more and more healthy people.
I skimmed the one study on top athletes being better than less top athletes (the one with traditional martial arts ie. not martial arts but actually gymnastics) and was not particularly convinced it was a good basis (because of don’t trust one study, and because the critera for being a top athlete in an art+gymnastics competition might not be so objective as to strongly relate to gut microbia. I would have been more reassured if it was on powerlifting with a continuously rising correlation between weight lifted and ‘gut health’.
For the specific person I gave as example, he’ll be approaching mid thirties by now so though I strongly feel he’d be a very strong candidate at 25 (also the peak of his athletic performance), he seems less particularly appropriate now due to age and not practising sports as much in the last few years.
I don’t want to be a dead end either, I can forward this article to folks in that engineering school currently (who’ll be around 25) and see if there’s anyone interested enough that I could give you their contact details to continue from.
Wow, that would be fantastic if you forwarded this article to those folks! Thank you :)