Posts Tagged ‘gut’
What’s in your gut – besides breakfast, lunch and supper?
Similar to the classification of blood types, the bacteria in our guts appear to fit into one of three categories that have no relation to our nationality, age, sex and other characteristics, new research indicates. The study combined genetic information from about three dozen people in six countries, revealing that everyone falls into one of three categories they dub enterotypes, which they believe are spread around the globe just like blood types.
Humans’ guts are home to swarms of bacteria. Members of this internal ecosystem help us with all sorts of important tasks, such as digesting food, assisting our immune systems and producing nutrients such as vitamin K. And research indicates there is a connection between these micro-organisms and some health problems, including obesity and inflammatory bowel disease.
Using an approach called metagenomics, researchers sequenced genetic material collected from fecal samples from 22 people in Denmark, France, Italy and Spain, and combined that with existing data from residents of Japan and the United States.
Their analysis revealed three enterotypes determined by the relative abundance of different networks of species, according to study researcher Peer Bork, a unit head at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany…
While the type of bacteria present in the gut showed no connection to the host’s characteristics, this was not the case for the bacteria’s function. For instance, the presence of bacteria capable of breaking down starch appears to increase with someone’s age. And men seem to carry more bacteria with the machinery to synthesize aspartate, an amino acid.
The findings, detailed in the most recent issue of the journal Nature, have implications for personalized medicine, in which treatments can be tailored to an individual’s needs…
Knowledge of enterotypes may also help with the development of techniques to restore healthy gut communities, rather than killing off all of the bugs living there with antibiotics…
I imagine we’ll have about as much cooperation with political systems and corporations with a vested interest in profitable processed foods in educating folks about enterotypes – as we do with anything else found to aid in healthful living.
That doesn’t even begin to count the ideologues whose “liberty” might be limited by science or reason.
OTOH, this study is miniscule – and expansive work is needed to corroborate anything more than an educated guess at this stage.
Are depressed people too clean?
“He’s very clean”
In an effort to pinpoint potential triggers leading to inflammatory responses that eventually contribute to depression, researchers are taking a close look at the immune systems of people living in today’s cleaner, modern society.
Rates of depression have steadily grown, and researchers think it may be because of the loss of healthy bacteria.
In a review article published in the December issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, Emory neuroscientist Charles Raison, MD, and colleagues identified data that suggests there is mounting evidence that disruptions in ancient relationships with microorganisms in soil, food and the gut may contribute to the increasing rates of depression.
According to the authors, the modern world has become so clean, we are deprived of the bacteria our immune systems came to rely on over long ages to keep inflammation at bay…
“Since ancient times benign microorganisms, sometimes referred to as ‘old friends,’ have taught the immune system how to tolerate other harmless microorganisms, and in the process, reduce inflammatory responses that have been linked to the development of most modern illnesses, from cancer to depression.”
Experiments are currently being conducted to test the efficacy of treatments that use properties of these “old friends” to improve emotional tolerance. “If the exposure to administration of the ‘old friends’ improves depression,” the authors conclude, “the important question of whether we should encourage measured re-exposure to benign environmental microorganisms will not be far behind.”
Eat really good traditional yogurt. Maintain evolutionary status as an omnivore. And watch this space.
Could the germs in your gut underlie Western frailties?
Germs living in the gut may cause higher rates of allergies, chronic stomach upsets and even obesity among children living in rich industrialized countries, researchers reported.
They compared intestinal bacteria between European Union children and young villagers in remote Burkina Faso, and found enough differences to help explain disparities in chronic disease and obesity…
“Our results suggest that diet has a dominant role over other possible variables such as ethnicity, sanitation, hygiene, geography, and climate, in shaping the gut microbiota,” Paolo Lionetti of the University of Florence in Italy and colleagues wrote. “We can hypothesize that the reduction in richness we observe in EU compared with Burkina Faso children, could indicate how the consumption of sugar, animal fat, and calorie-dense foods in industrialized countries is rapidly limiting the adaptive potential of the microbiota.”
The study builds on a body of evidence that human health relies heavily on the trillions of microorganisms living in and on our bodies. Only a fraction cause disease directly — many more help digest food, affect other bacteria and may influence hundreds of biological functions…
The Italian team found the African children had many bacteria that help break down fiber, but the European children were lacking these microbes. The ratios were similar to studies comparing the gut bacteria of lean people to obese people.
This bacterial balance could even be causing obesity, the researchers said. It may also be useful to test children for these bacteria to see if they are at high risk of becoming obese, they said.
“Reduction in microbial richness is possibly one of the undesirable effects of globalization and of eating generic, nutrient-rich, uncontaminated foods,” Lionetti’s team wrote in the study.
Too true. Especially if you’re ignorant enough to restrain your hunter-gatherer expeditions to some chain store supermarket.
Restricting your diet to choices limited to processed meat, processed cheese, steamed and bleached flour products, canned veggies and the range of what passes as inconvenient foods [in my mind] – restricts healthful living to a narrower range of vectors mostly governed by chance.
Learn more about what you eat. Please!
Was it cooking that made us human?
Cooking is something we all take for granted but a new theory suggests that if we had not learned to cook food, not only would we still look like chimps but, like them, we would also be compelled to spend most of the day chewing.
Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive. The daily mountain of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon.
It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors’ diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase. Meat – a more concentrated form of energy – not only meant bigger brains for our ancestors, but also an end to the need to devote nearly all their time to foraging to maintain energy levels. As a consequence, more time was available for social structure to develop.
Goodbye, needle. Hello, yogurt smoothie!
The bad green guy eats the small blue dots activating other stuff which kills the bad guy
Instead of a dreaded injection with a needle, someday getting vaccinated against disease may be as pleasant as drinking a yogurt smoothie.
A researcher from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has developed a new oral vaccine using probiotics, the healthy bacteria that are found in dairy products like yogurt and cheese. He has successfully used the approach in a preclinical study to create immunity to anthrax exposure. He also is using the method to develop a breast cancer vaccine and vaccines for various infectious diseases.
This new generation vaccine has big benefits beyond eliminating the “Ouch!” factor. Delivering the vaccine to the gut — rather than injecting it into a muscle — harnesses the full power of the body’s primary immune force, which is located in the small intestine.
“This is potentially a great advance in the way we give vaccines to people,” said Mansour Mohamadzadeh, the lead author.
“You swallow the vaccine, and the bacteria colonize your intestine and start to produce the vaccine in your gut,” Mohamadzadeh said. “Then it’s quickly dispatched throughout your body. If you can activate the immune system in your gut, you get a much more powerful immune response than by injecting it. The pathogenic bacteria will be eliminated faster.”
RTFA. There’s more to come.
Terrence Barrett makes the point, “Nature isn’t used to seeing antigens injected into a muscle. The place where your immune system is designed to encounter and mount a defense against antigens is your gut.” We didn’t evolve sticking needles into ourselves.
