the importance of bacteria (gut, food, health)

[soul food]

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles ... ke-fat.htm

Bacteria Can Make You Fat?!

by Brian Stallard

Researchers have determined that a very specific species of gut bacteria coupled with a high-fat diet may cause animals to gain weight, causing experts to wonder if it can seriously impact weight loss efforts.
A new study recently published in the journal mBio details how the gut bacteria Clostridium ramosum helped mice gain weight far faster on a high-fat diet compared to mice on the same diet without the bacteria present.


Read more: http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles ... z3F3sQC3Qf

[soul food]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 123522.htm

Jet lag can cause obesity by disrupting the daily rhythms of gut microbes
Date:
October 16, 2014
Source:
Cell Press
Summary:
Organisms ranging from bacteria to humans have circadian clocks to help them synchronize their biological activities to the time of day. A study now reveals that gut microbes in mice and humans have circadian rhythms that are controlled by the biological clock of the host in which they reside. Disruption of the circadian clock in the host alters the rhythms and composition of the microbial community, leading to obesity and metabolic problems.

[soul food]

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-10-g ... -role.html

How gut bacteria ensures a healthy brain – and could play a role in treating depression
by Clio Korn



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http://www.gutmicrobiotawatch.org/


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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014 ... e-medicine

I had the bacteria in my gut analysed. And this may be the future of medicine
Andrew Anthony sent his stool off to have its bacteria sequenced. In the future, such techniques could help assess our susceptibility to conditions from diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's to autism, depression and cancer

Andrew Anthony

Andrew Anthony

But there was plenty of evidence of high fibre, which is good because bacteria feed on fibre. If we don't feed bacteria, they feed off us – specifically the mucus lining in our large intestine

Sarcopenia means loss of muscle mass. It happens as we get older because the body becomes less efficient at turning protein into muscle, which is why older people need to have more protein. "We think that the narrowing of gut bacteria in old people is making the intestine less efficient at absorbing proteins," says O'Toole.

Common to all these issues, particularly among the aged, is the narrowing of the gut microbiota which, in turn, is usually the result of a narrowing of diet. This is a point that O'Toole repeatedly emphasises.

"Diversity is the key. What we see with people on narrow diversity diets is that the microbiota collapses. A good analogy would be an ecosystem like a rainforest, where you've got loads of plants and animals interacting. It's evolved over tens of thousands of years, then one of the key species, a tree, gets cut down and you get ecological collapse.

"And if you had a gentleman whose wife died and she had done all the cooking, and then he's suddenly eating toast and marmalade, the diversity of gut microbiota will collapse – because diversity of diet correlates with diversity of microbiota – and y

Tooth decay

An early coloniser of teeth, Streptococcus mutans is one of 25 species of oral streptococci to live in the oral cavity.

Normally they cause few problems, turning sucrose into a "glue" to cohere to teeth, helping to form dental plaques. However, if S. mutans is given other types of sugar – glucose, fructose or lactose, for example – in addition to the plaques, it also starts producing lactic acid.

While dental plaques comprise hundreds of species of bacteria, it is this combination of lactic acid and plaque caused by S. mutans that is a primary cause of tooth decay.

Type 2 diabetes

It is already known that type 2 diabetes can be caused by a number of genetic and environmental components, but recent research has shed some light on a possible microbial element. It was found that patients with type 2 diabetes had lower rates of butyrate-producing bacteria, an important food for cells lining the colon.

It was also found that there was a clear relationship between people with type 2 diabetes and the specific species of bacteria found in their gut. This association is so great that the analysis of gut microbiomes can be used as a diagnostic test for type 2 diabetes.

Cancer

While chronic infection of H. pylori has been known to increase the risk of stomach cancer by four to six times, it is now becoming clearer that other bacteria may have a role to play in increasing or decreasing a person's susceptibility to other forms of cancer. A study of 70,000 individuals showed that patients with periodontitis – inflamed and bleeding gums due to poor oral hygiene – had double the risk of cancers of the oral cavity and digestive tract. The risk of cancer rose with increasing severity of periodontitis and was specifically associated with the oral bacterium Porphyromonas gingivalis.

[soul food]

http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/11 ... biome.html

NOV. 07, 2014
Spilling Our Guts: Decreased Diversity in the Human Microbiome

To the people taking the gut microbiome class, feel free to post in this thread.

thanks,

soul food

[soul food]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2 ... ntent=2039

How Bacteria In The Gut Help Fight Off Viruses

Michaeleen Doucleff

November 14, 2014 5:29 PM ET

You've got a trillion friends in low places: Bacteria in the gut may protect against viruses by signaling their presence to your immune system.

The secret to stopping a deadly stomach virus may be sitting right there in our guts, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Science. Or more specifically, the treatment is in our microbiome — the trillions of bacteria that inconspicuously hang out in the GI tracts.

Immunologists at Georgia State University found that a tiny piece of gut bacteria can prevent and cure a rotavirus infection in mice.

[soul food]

http://consumer.healthday.com/gastroint ... obVbsyDw.1

Could Popular Heartburn Drugs Upset Your 'Good' Gut Bugs?
Study suggests class of meds upset healthy balance of bacteria in the gut

Could Popular Heartburn Drugs Upset Your 'Good' Gut Bugs?
By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, Nov. 25, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Heartburn drugs such as Prilosec and Nexium may disrupt the makeup of bacteria in the digestive system, potentially boosting the risk of infections and other problems, a small new study suggests.

Edit add

Combating Acid Reflux May Bring Host of Ills

By RONI CARYN RABIN

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/2 ... ills/?_r=0

But in recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has issued numerous warnings about P.P.I.’s, saying long-term use and high doses have been associated with an increased risk of bone fractures and infection with a bacterium called Clostridium difficile that can be especially dangerous to elderly patients. In a recent paper, experts recommended that older adults use the drugs only “for the shortest duration possible.”

Stomach acid is needed to break down food and absorb nutrients, he said, as well as for proper functioning of the gallbladder and pancreas. Long-term of use of P.P.I.’s may interfere with these processes, he noted. And suppression of stomach acid, which kills bacteria and other microbes, may make people more susceptible to infections, like C. difficile.

Taking P.P.I.’s, Dr. Plotnikoff said, “changes the ecology of the gut and actually allows overgrowth of some things that normally would be kept under control.”

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Wow, do it yourself fecal transplants

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEMnRC22oOs



http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/ ... experiment

The Excrement Experiment
Treating disease with fecal transplants.

BY EMILY EAKIN

His mother showed him an article from the Times about a man who had been nearly bedridden by ulcerative colitis—a condition related to Crohn’s—and who had largely recovered after a month or so of fecal transplants. Gravel found a how-to book on Amazon and bought the recommended equipment: a blender, a rectal syringe, saline solution, surgical gloves, Tupperware containers. His wife agreed to be his donor. Doctors and patient-advocacy Web sites stress that donors should be screened for transmissible diseases, but Gravel and his wife decided to skip this step. “She’d been healthy as long as I’d known her,” he told me.

Clostridium difficile. The infection, which causes symptoms similar to Crohn’s, afflicts more than five hundred thousand people each year, killing fifteen thousand of them, almost all hospital patients who received antibiotics. Like a weed killer that slays not just the invading vine but, inadvertently, the entire garden, broad-spectrum antibiotics, which are prescribed prophylactically to patients undergoing surgery, can destroy gut flora, making it easier for C. difficile to take hold. Moreover, the standard treatment for the disease—vancomycin, itself an antibiotic—is often ineffective against drug-resistant, “hypervirulent” new strains.

Scattered case reports in the medical literature described C. difficile patients, some on their deathbeds, who received fecal transplants and recovered, often within hours. Then, in January, 2013, The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the first randomized controlled trial involving FMT, comparing the therapy to treatment with vancomycin for patients with recurrent disease. The trial was ended early when doctors realized that it would be unethical to continue: fewer than a third of the patients given vancomycin recovered, compared with ninety-four per cent of those who underwent fecal transplants—the vast majority after a single treatment. A glowing editorial accompanying the article declared that the trial’s significance “goes far beyond the treatment of recurrent or severe C. difficile” and predicted a spate of research into the benefits of fecal transplants for other diseases.

“Nothing in health care works ninety per cent of the time,” Mark B. Smith, a microbiologist at M.I.T. who is a co-founder of OpenBiome, the stool bank, told me. Zain Kassam, a gastroenterologist who is OpenBiome’s chief medical officer, put it this way: “It’s the closest thing to a miracle I’ve seen in medicine.”]

ith and his colleagues are stool’s most enterprising pitchmen, displaying a zeal for the collection and distribution of human waste that, as much as any other single force, has helped to catapult FMT to the front lines of medical treatment. The inspiration for OpenBiome was a friend of Smith’s, an otherwise healthy man in his twenties who, in 2011, acquired C. difficile following gallbladder surgery. “He ended up on seven rounds of vancomycin over a year and half,” Smith told me. “He was very sick.” The man found a doctor who was open to the idea of performing a fecal transplant and waited six months while the doctor researched the procedure. Finally, unable to wait any longer, he gave himself a transplant using his roommate’s stool. “It worked for him,” Smith, who was then completing his Ph.D., said. “But the whole thing seemed very bizarre to me: why is it so hard to get a treatment that is very effective?”

edit add

n addition to C. difficile patients, Borody says that he has successfully treated people with autoimmune disorders, including Crohn’s and multiple sclerosis.

particular, the Sonnenburgs stress the adverse effects of a standard Western diet, which is notoriously light on the plant fibre that serves as fuel for gut microbes. Less fuel means fewer types of microbes and fewer of the chemical by-products that microbes produce as they ferment our food. Research in mice suggests that those by-products help reduce inflammation and regulate the immune system. Noting that rates of so-called Western diseases—including heart disease and autoimmune disorders, all of which involve inflammation—are thought to be much lower in traditional societies, the Sonnenburgs write, “It is possible that the Western microbiota is actually dysbiotic and predisposes individuals to a variety of diseases.”

he gene was a clue, but not everyone with a genetic predisposition gets the disease. New research pointed to the microbiome as a likely factor. So Smarr sent a stool specimen to the J. Craig Venter Institute, the genetics-research organization, where a colleague agreed to sequence his microbes—into two hundred million strings of DNA. In a typical Western gut, two phyla of bacteria are overwhelmingly dominant: Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. Together, they comprise roughly ninety per cent of our microbes. Smarr’s gut was nearly devoid of Bacteroidetes—a finding consistent with other Crohn’s patients. Equally disconcerting, Smarr had abundant archaea, obscure microorganisms known for their ability to survive in harsh environments, such as the hot springs at Yellowstone National Park. “At my highest level of inflammation, I was twenty-per-cent archaea,” Smarr said. “I’ve probably got the world’s record.”

Ten per cent of his bacteria were E. coli, a species that in healthy people is found in minute amounts, typically representing less than one per cent of the microbiome. A researcher at Smarr’s lab consulted a database at the National Institutes of Health containing DNA sequences for all the E. coli strains that had been identified at the time—about eight hundred—and found a match for Smarr’s strain. Known as “adherent-invasive E. coli,” the strain is often found in the guts of Crohn’s patients, where it digs through the mucus lining the colon and latches on to the healthy cells beneath. (Smarr: “Very sci-fi!”)

Finally, he felt that he had solved much of the puzzle of his disease: “The immune system senses that there’s a strain of E. coli that’s pathogenic, so it fires up, and when the body fires up the immune system you have inflammation.” Sandborn, Smarr’s doctor, called this hypothesis “very plausible.” But, he cautioned, it’s not clear whether an abnormal microbiome causes the inflammation or whether it’s the other way around.

soul food

[soul food]

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30337215

December 2014

Friendly gut bacteria 'help to attack malaria'

Friendly bacteria in the human gut can trigger a natural immune response against malaria, say researchers.

They found that sugary proteins on the surface of some healthy gut bacteria train the immune system to fend off the malaria parasite.

Tests, in the journal Cell, showed the same sugary protein could be used in a vaccine to immunise mice against malaria.


“
Start Quote

If we can vaccinate these young children against alpha-gal, many lives might be saved.”

It may explain why some people never catch malaria.

There is a vast community of bacteria living in the human gut that keeps us healthy.

It is estimated that 3.4 billion people are at risk of contracting malaria.

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http://www.cleveland.com/lyndhurst-sout ... _impo.html

[bTrusting your gut, and the importance of your microbiome: Words on Wellness[/b]

[soul food]

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health- ... cer-95902/

How Gut Microbes Can Help Us Detect Cancer

BY MICHAEL WHITE • December 05, 2014

Behavioral changes in our gut ecosystems will likely become key to spotting cancer—but can the new diagnostic methods help scientists treat it?

.

[soul food]

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/286912.php

Study links Parkinson's disease to gut bacteria

[nbomb]

this thread is great. I've been reading a lot about probiotics the last couple months and how an altered gut microbiome can lead to dysfunction and illness. The beneficial bacteria in our body outnumber our cells 10 to 1.

This outlines the importance avoiding antibiotics and any foods that contain antibiotics (animal foods) as well as herbicides (non-organic produce).

I think one of the biggest factors in all this is glyphosate - the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup - which is now present everywhere in our environment and foods, especially genetically modified corn and soy which is present in almost all processed foods. Although wheat is not genetically modified, farmers follow the practice of spraying glyphosate on wheat just prior to harvest to make it easier to process.

Glyphosate is absolutely devastating to our beneficial bacteria causing an imbalance and allowing pathogenic bacteria to take control over the friendly species.

The solution? eat organic, supplement probiotics, avoid animal products (if eating animal foods make sure organic and non GMO feed), eat plenty of fiber (probiotics feed on grains rich in fiber), and avoid GMO foods (specifically corn and soy).

[Crider]

I've published my favorite video lecture from the Mirco Biome Coursera class. It's called The Gut-Brain Axis.

[soul food]

Thank You nbomb and Crider.

I watched the video. Wow, 90% of serotonin is in your gut.
The glyphosate problem as come to me before but I just wasn't as deep into the importance of gut bacteria to have a more urgent sense of it's importance. Well I am now.
soul food

Gut-Wrenching: New Studies Reveal the Insidious Effects of Glyphosate

March 26th, 2014
By Pamela Coleman, PhD

http://www.cornucopia.org/2014/03/gut-w ... lyphosate/

Contrary to the current widely-held misconception that glyphosate is relatively harmless to humans, the available evidence shows that glyphosate may rather be the most important factor in the development of multiple chronic diseases and conditions that have become prevalent in Westernized societies.”[i] [emphasis added]

Acute vs. Chronic Toxicity

The acute toxicity of glyphosate is relatively low, meaning that accidentally ingesting it will likely not cause immediate harm. Chronic toxicity—the effects of continually ingesting glyphosate residues in food—is cause for concern. Glyphosate interferes with fundamental biochemical reactions and may predispose humans to obesity, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other health problems.

It’s easy to overlook these effects. Toxicity studies on laboratory animals are typically short term, often only a few months. The harm from low-level, chronic exposure can only be seen after a long period of time, often years, or even decades. The real guinea pigs in this case are humans.

indirect Evidence of Harm: Glyphosate Interferes with Biochemistry of Bacteria

Describing the effects of glyphosate, the Entropy article states: “Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time.”[ii] The authors cite several ways glyphosate may contribute to the chronic diseases that have occurred with increasing frequency as use of the herbicide has increased.

[bR]oundup® kills plants by interfering with a biochemical pathway involved with synthesis of amino acids, called the shikimate pathway. This pathway is not found in humans, therefore it was assumed that glyphosate does not harm humans. The pathway is found in bacteria, however, and humans depend on bacteria in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract to synthesize the essential amino acids.

By interfering with the biochemistry of bacteria in our GI tract, [/b]consumption of glyphosate depletes essential amino acids and predisposes humans to a host of chronic health problems. Specifically, glyphosate depletes the amino acids tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine, which can then contribute to obesity, depression, autism, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.]

There is also evidence that Roundup® inhibits cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes in plants[iii] and mammals[iv]. The CYP enzymes help to detoxify foreign chemicals (such as pesticides), regulate levels of vitamin D, and control cholesterol in humans.

[/quote]

soul food

[Wumpus]

Glyphosate is absolutely devastating to our beneficial bacteria causing an imbalance and allowing pathogenic bacteria to take control over the friendly species.

At the concentrations typical of glyphosate in GMO foods?

With regard to probiotic products, my understanding is that the understanding of our microbiome is still very rudimentary. There's a lot of relevant data within the space but we usually only measure a fraction of it at a time and the space itself is often complex and dynamic, and hence hard to understand. It is very easy, however, to pull out potentially spurious associations from that space, and these in turn are the most interesting studies to publish. Once they are published, sites such as this one with an established bias will tend to pull only those results that support their views, leading to 'established' gut flora science that supports many competing ideologies, provided that these ideologies don't think too hard about the evidence. The market is fine with promoting this confused state of affairs in trying to promote a variety of competing products, and probiotic products themselves are essentially unregulated, untested, and unproven.

[soul food]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_AHLDX ... e=youtu.be

Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide—Featuring the Darth Vader Chemical

just started watching

edit add, maybe better to watch this here, they have smaller sections of the video as well.

http://action.responsibletechnology.org ... _KEY=11129

Stephanie Seneff website with all her articles.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/

This is all related to gut bacteria. Our gut bacteria use the shikimate pathway which glyphosate disrupts-- immobilizes which then has a cascading effect.



First they talk about Autism.

At about 26 minutes they say that this tryptophan deficiency (caused by glyphosate) interferes with the the serotonin in the gut and serotonin is an appetite suppressant and so is linked to obesity and depression.

at 42:00 M.S. and leaky gut

at 43:36 Leaky gut, because of the glyphosate interferring with the gut bacteria, it causes a sulphate deficiency and so the cells shrink, and the cell connections aren't tight, they have holes...leaky gut

45:40 Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Anorexia
Crohn, Colitis

51:56 Heart Disease and Diabetes...here is where it get radical
because of no ENOS(endothelio...)

[nbomb]

everything i've read about glyohosate/round-up/Monsanto in the past year has been absolutely terrifying. I believe a lot of health problems can be traced back to GMO's and glyphosate. I wish McDougall would talk more about this ongoing epidemic.

I'm also 99% certain gluten intolerance is caused by glyphosate. As mentioned before, farmers spray glyphosate on non-organic wheat prior to harvest. I have a feeling the glyphosate is leading to leaky gut syndrome allowing the gluten protein to pass through the intestinal barrier causing an immune reaction. This may lead to a multitude of other food allergies as well, not just gluten.