Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#2Three days?
Three weeks would be more noteworthy, but really get back to me after three months or three years.
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#3Although it sounds like an amazing experience, I'm not really sure if we should be impressed with the results of the experiment. How much of the increase in floral biodiversity was just from going somewhere far away from home? That is, if he'd eaten food for three days in Pretoria or Bangalore, would he have seen the same increase? Or is there something special about a hunter/gatherer diet?
(...and yeah, for the purposes of this comment, I'm setting aside the n=1 problem. It's not really supposed to be a scientific experiment, obviously, but the writeup sure sounds like it's supposed to prove a point.)
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#4Three days? Three weeks would be more noteworthy, but really get back to me after three months or three years.
Three days is a long time to a bacterium. E coli has a generation time of 20 minutes, Staph aureus is about 30. So we're looking at a hundred generations or so. It's not nothing.
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#5Is there any actual science behind this?
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#6Building on this article, for those who are interested in some science on the subject, what you eat greatly influences your biome. A vegan diet has been shown to substantially change your flora [1] in as little as a day [2]. I also found this video on the role of fiber, our gut flora, and our immune system interesting [3].
[1]: http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v66/n1/full/ejcn2011141a....
[2]: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7484/full/nature1...
[3]: http://nutritionfacts.org/video/prebiotics-tending-our-inner...
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#7Three days? Three weeks would be more noteworthy, but really get back to me after three months or three years.
Three days is a long time to a bacterium. E coli has a generation time of 20 minutes, Staph aureus is about 30. So we're looking at a hundred generations or so. It's not nothing.
It is certainly something when only focused on individual bacteria.
But the whole system including gut flora and human body changes. And that takes more time. 3 days a different diet? Not a lot to see much change in the body. Would you trust any diet related study that only lasts three whole days?
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#8Three days? Three weeks would be more noteworthy, but really get back to me after three months or three years.
Three days is a long time to a bacterium. E coli has a generation time of 20 minutes, Staph aureus is about 30. So we're looking at a hundred generations or so. It's not nothing.
The test is to see the impact on whole system health, which is determined by the slowest constituent parts, not the fastest.
Certainly, colonic flora has super high generation time, but the health of the system cannot measurably change over a three day period without changes in measurements falling well within error tolerance. Even if health did improve, the time span chosen is not long enough to sufficiently determine correlation, let alone causation.
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#9Three days? Three weeks would be more noteworthy, but really get back to me after three months or three years.
Three days is a long time to a bacterium. E coli has a generation time of 20 minutes, Staph aureus is about 30. So we're looking at a hundred generations or so. It's not nothing.
And 3 minutes is a really long time when you're driving the porcelain bus because of sudden changes in your gut bacteria.
Re: Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health
#10Building on this article, for those who are interested in some science on the subject, what you eat greatly influences your biome. A vegan diet has been shown to substantially change your flora [1] in as little as a day [2]. I also found this video on the role of fiber, our gut flora, and our immune system interesting [3]. [1]: http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v66/n1/full/ejcn2011141a.... [2]: http://www.nature.com…
> Conclusions: Maintaining a strict vegan or vegetarian diet results in a significant shift in the microbiota while total cell numbers remain unaltered.
Studies should almost never use the term "vegan diet" to arrive at any conclusions. A vegan diet can be potato chips and oreos, whole foods high carb, whole foods high fat, 100% raw, etc. I assume most of them would produce significantly different results.