Doug here. Some basics:
I am not a scientist, and I take full responsibility for any mistakes and mis-interpretations in my work. (Although the film itself represents a post-apocalyptic incomplete understanding of history and a fictional scenario, and some distortions are intentional.)
I also don’t know a way to calculate the level of truth in this scenario, given that many statements are internally conjecture. But 43.5% feels like a number I can stand behind.
All of the source clips from educational films have not had their audio altered, although in some cases the images associated with the audio have been modified. In some cases these include statements that were once believed to have been true that are false, or were true at the time but no longer are. For instance, Bolivia’s tin exports are no longer the significant economic driver they once were.
All pages from Wikipedia have been unmodified and are as reliably true as that source. This includes the story of William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin, although the insertion of a cupcake with a lit candle is a fanciful imagining of the animator. For those who can’t be bothered to read 280 pages detailing his experiments, the NIH site has a good overview.
The history of microbial science involving Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Marcus Plencic, Ignaz Semmelweis and Louis Pasteur is roughly true, although the involvement of gut microbes is, at best, indefensible conjecture.
Hurricane Eloise happened, and the asteroid Castalia exists. There is no proof that any fragment of it fell to Earth, or that it contains any kind of microbial life.
The meltdown at Three Mile Island happened, obviously, but the author has not determined whether Susquehanna River water fuels HersheyPark’s rides and drinking fountains. It is safe to assume that visitors have not been infected by alien gut microbes. It is also unlikely that members of CompuServe were infected by gut microbes, although given its proximity to HersheyPark, one of the developers of CB Simulator may well have enjoyed the theme park.
Rik Luytjes did in fact import lots and lots of cocaine.
Everything about the physiology of the human body – the presence of microbes in your guts, the neurons and neurotransmitters in the enteric nervous system, the functions of the vagus nerve and interoception network, and so on – is, to the author’s belief, accurate, with a few exceptions.
Whether gut microbes can stimulate the vagus nerve to engage in any sort of behaviour, much less to specifically engage in behaviours that stimulate the production of neurotransmitters, is unknown.
KLE1738 is a real microbe, although any relation to alcoholism is unproven, and scientists most likely do not call it Kailey. Initial reports indicated that KLE1738’s diet of GABA meant leaky gut syndrome allowed the transmission of neurotransmitters to the gut, but further research suggests its presence is a byproduct of gut bacteria. Read more here.
The author presents reporting from the holy war of Niverna in 1099 without comment on its possible factual accuracy, and is generally agnostic on the topic of spontaneous human combustion. Exploding Gut Syndrome, by contrast, is completely invented, but perhaps not impossible.
Audio-Geometric Cleansing and the Collaborative Purgation System are inventions of the author. Do not eat raw chicken, please. Nonetheless, techniques such as neuro-linguistic programming suggest that rewriting neural pathways could be an effective way to break habits associated with dopamine-seeking behaviour.
Vagotomies are currently used for severe peptic ulcer cases where stomach acid production is out of control. The author does not recommend this procedure.
Fecal implants are a way of reshaping the gut microbiome, as has been widely reported in recent years. The author was first introduced to this concept in the book The Diet Myth by Tim Spector.
Other books used as research, none of whose authors should be held liable for the author’s egregious misuse of their work:
Lisa Barrett, How Emotions Are Made
Danielle Capalino, The Microbiome Diet Plan
Alanna Collen, 10% Human
Giulia Enders, Gut
Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection
Michael Mosley, The Clever Guts Diet
Mary Roach, Gulp
Justin Sonnenburg, The Good Gut
Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes
This is probably an incomplete list, and the author will update as appropriate.