How does probiotic helps here?
Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
101–110 of 318 posts
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People are becoming even lactose intolerant. This isn't new, and certainly isn't some crisis of the last 100 years. Historically only a minority of the planet has ever been lactase persistent into adulthood. It's a well-understood genetic trait, not some product of gut microbes.
You can think of this being evolutionary beneficial, if some milk is bad, the whole village don't all get sick. Also a possible reason for why people have different taste preferences.
It's probably simpler than that: it's simply not energy-efficient to keep producing an enzyme throughout its life for a sugar that's rare-to-non-existent in an organism's diet for most of that life. Because mammals don't have any means of obtaining milk once they separate from their mother, lactose intolerance for their lifetime after weaning is almost universal among mammals. Over millions of years, the slight energy efficiency win of turning off that enzyme's production post-weaning probably won out.
Humans are odd in that we harvest milk for consumption at all beyond our own mother's, which is probably why we're the only species with a notable population with the genetic mutation that allows some of us to digest it – there's no competitive advantage to that mutation in most other mammals, because where would they even obtain milk?
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#103Lacking these gut microbes has been posited to lead to depression and effect mood by a few researchers:
https://www.science.org/content/article/evidence-mounts-gut-...
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#104I'd be really curious where some of these wild microbes can be found so we can repopulate them. Every time I brush my teeth, use dish washing liquid or really any man made substance with a lots of ingredients I also wonder if I'm accidentally killing off my skin/mouth/gut microbiomes. Not worried enough to only use water (not that tap water can be fully trusted either....)
Explore the use of Miswak for your teeth.
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#105Pretty much every culture around the world 100 years ago had some staple fermented food. Nowadays, a lot of people in western culture at least outright refuse yogurt or other fermented foods like saurkraut or pickled cabbage that used to be staples in these people's ancestor's diets a few generations ago. People are becoming even lactose intolerant. You have to fertilize your microbes so to speak and eat these sorts…
> People are becoming even lactose intolerant. This isn't new, and certainly isn't some crisis of the last 100 years. Historically only a minority of the planet has ever been lactase persistent into adulthood. It's a well-understood genetic trait, not some product of gut microbes.
You are correct. It's likely that the majority of humans have been lactose intolerant for human history. It's primarily people of Northern European descent that are not lactose intolerant, but lactose intolerance is very common outside of those groups
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People are becoming even lactose intolerant. This isn't new, and certainly isn't some crisis of the last 100 years. Historically only a minority of the planet has ever been lactase persistent into adulthood. It's a well-understood genetic trait, not some product of gut microbes.
You can think of this being evolutionary beneficial, if some milk is bad, the whole village don't all get sick. Also a possible reason for why people have different taste preferences.
I think it's just that mammals don't drink milk once they are weaned.
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#107Interesting. Perhaps someone could do a geographical survey of people with IBD (Colitis / Chrons / etc).
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
One tricky part with fermented foods is that the salty ones appear to increase rates of colon and stomach cancer as I recall. I read something years ago about how as the Japanese population adapted a more western diet, heaps of ailments came upon them as you’d expect, but their salt intake declined so dramatically that they stopped experiencing stroke and GI tract cancers nearly as much. I think you’d need to pin dow…
Seems unlikely. A lot of the traditional West African diet is fermented and they have the lowest rates of colon cancer on Earth. Smoked foods and foods containing nitrates/nitrates are correlated with stomach and colon cancer, but not salty or fermented foods. Studies that show a correlation of salt intake with cancer are very possibly confusing intake of smoked meat or processed meat (also high in salt) with colon c…
Interesting, thanks for that. I hadn’t seen it yet. Though the rest still stands, and as mentioned in the paper, reducing sodium intake is still recommended for other health benefits. There is a wealth of other research showing that most people in North America should dramatically reduce their sodium intake.
> Reduction of processed meat intake may be an effective strategy for CRC prevention, while sodium reduction should still be recommended to achieve other health benefits.
Apart from that, I’m still seeing evidence of correlation with stomach cancer, even if not in the lower GI tract:
https://www.wcrf.org/salt-shaking-up-the-link-with-stomach-c...
Given the connection to stomach cancer and cardiovascular disease, it does seem wise to be careful about salt intake.
Regarding west African diets, are they high in salted fermented foods or just fermented foods? It seems if the food is low in salt, it’s probably just fine
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#109I think the consensus is nobody really knows and nutritional science is largely trendy pseudoscience…
I've always been shocked at how crappy the research into nutrition is and how there's very little consensus beyond "vegetables are good" and how shoddy a lot of the professional training is for dieticians. Nearly everybody eats nearly every day, how have we not figured this out?
Re: Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
#110Pretty much every culture around the world 100 years ago had some staple fermented food. Nowadays, a lot of people in western culture at least outright refuse yogurt or other fermented foods like saurkraut or pickled cabbage that used to be staples in these people's ancestor's diets a few generations ago. People are becoming even lactose intolerant. You have to fertilize your microbes so to speak and eat these sorts…
One tricky part with fermented foods is that the salty ones appear to increase rates of colon and stomach cancer as I recall. I read something years ago about how as the Japanese population adapted a more western diet, heaps of ailments came upon them as you’d expect, but their salt intake declined so dramatically that they stopped experiencing stroke and GI tract cancers nearly as much. I think you’d need to pin dow…
You may be thinking of this.
https://www.newser.com/story/119965/so-do-pickles-really-cau...