Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
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Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#2Here is a case where the research is lagging the knowledge base. Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. What we need now is research that looks at outcomes.
Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#3Here is a case where the research is lagging the knowledge base. Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. What we need now is research that looks at outcomes.
These results indicate that you can eat anything, not just foods enriched with bacteria like probiotic yogurt (which has questionable benefits in itself http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-probioti...), and observe a change in gut microbiota.
"Turnbaugh’s team found that switching mice to a high-sugar, high-fat diet reshaped the abundance of the community of microbes in the gut to a new, stable makeup within three days, in a reproducible manner that was largely independent of genetic differences among individual mice."
Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#4Here is a case where the research is lagging the knowledge base. Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. What we need now is research that looks at outcomes.
> Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria.
The problem with this is that they are frequently wrong. Many people respond poorly to these type of probiotic diets, and holistic medicine has observed outcomes in a small portion of the population and thus encouraged us to generalize them. All we really know about the gut is that it is extremely complicated and that in terms of gut conditions' ("IBS") relationship with gut microbiota they run the gamut. Many of them are either not directly affected by microbiota population (ie: nerve damage, circadian rhythm ), or gut microbiota are part of a multi-causal problem.
We need more science like this, that reaffirms what we "know," not more holistic bullshit.
Source: IBS sufferer who has spent years talking to GI specialists and reading research papers about this stuff. It's hard, and as soon as you think you have it figured out it smacks you in the face with another factor you haven't considered.
Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#5Study seems to follow common-sense - change the nutrients ingested and different gut bacteria will flourish.
What I'm really interested in is which types of bacteria create a feedback loop by releasing chemicals/hormones to increase hunger or cravings for specific foods. Definitely not an easy thing to determine given all the variables, but it seems very likely based on the other studies showing bacteria can promote fat or thin mice: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...
Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#6Eh, as a researcher at the periphery of the Human Microbiome Project and American Gut project this has been the accepted (and already shown, experimentally) conclusion for quite some time.
Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#7It would be interesting to hear both why the chose a "high fat-high sugar" diet and to see further research that did more isolated tests in the vein of "high carb", "high fat" and "high protein" instead of combinations of them. Also, what are the implications of altered gut makeup after adopting these diets? Surely we could come up with experiments to measure metabolism and behavior as a result of the altered gut bacteria.
It will be fascinating to see how our understanding of nutrition and diet changes as science finally catches up. Studies like this are just the beginning.
Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#8Eh, as a researcher at the periphery of the Human Microbiome Project and American Gut project this has been the accepted (and already shown, experimentally) conclusion for quite some time.
This study examined two new things:
1. The speed at which the microbiome can change (2. The permanence of such changes (some of them are more permanent than others)
Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#9Given the evident link between gut bacteria and mental health, it may be that we'll see diet as a component of psychiatric care in the future.
(http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscienti...)
Re: Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes
#10Here is a case where the research is lagging the knowledge base. Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. What we need now is research that looks at outcomes.
These results indicate that you can eat anything, not just foods enriched with bacteria like probiotic yogurt (which has questionable benefits in itself http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-probioti... ), and observe a change in gut microbiota. "Turnbaugh’s team found that switching mice to a high-sugar, high-fat diet reshaped the abundance of the community of microbes in the gut to a new, stable makeu…
Not sure I follow - is there a suggestion that you can only eat 'foods enriched with bacteria like probiotic yogurt'? I would think the less questionable benefits of eating yogurt would be calcium and protein, at the very least. This study didn't try to feed any sort of special 'probiotic' foods to the mice.